The Immortality Game

by Ted Cross

  Georgy had always run drugs, weapons, women, or cash. Zoya had never known his gang to deal in data cards. She considered trying the small chip, but the thought made her nervous, so she slipped the cards back in her pocket.

  The cab dropped from the main taxi lane and slowed as the refugee camp in what used to be Kolomenskoe Park came into view. Even at mid-morning the mess of nailed-together boards, shipping containers, canvas, and tiny pre-fab hovels teemed with people.

  The taxi plowed to a halt above the cracked concrete parking lot of her apartment building. She stuck her thumb back on the screen to confirm receipt of service, waited for the beep, and shoved her way out of the cab.

  She hurried toward the entrance to her apartment block but pulled up short, her heart suddenly thudding in her chest. Two sky cycles and an old green solar car were parked near the entrance. She’d seen the car many times; it belonged to Georgy’s creepy friend Tavik.

  She couldn’t stop a whimpered cry from escaping her mouth: “Mama.”

  Her first urge was to run upstairs and try to trade the chips for her mother. She remembered all the times Georgy had bragged about Tavik’s ruthlessness. “He leaves no one alive, ever,” he was always fond of saying. Zoya shuddered and tried to calm her spiraling thoughts. She needed to be able to think clearly. Call her!

  She took off running toward the entrance, ignoring the stitch as it struck again at her side. She skidded to a halt at the door long enough to punch in the security code. When the door clicked, she flung it open and ran past the broken elevator toward the stairs. Her apartment was on the tenth floor, but she stopped on the fourth and ran down the hallway to Baba Sima’s door. She pushed the buzzer and began rapping hard on the steel door.

  “Baba! Open up, it’s Zoya!”

  There was a muffled reply and she heard the bolt click back on the door. She pushed it open and flung her arms around the tiny old lady on the other side. Though Zoya called her ‘Baba’, Sima wasn’t truly her grandmother, but she’d been a close friend of Zoya’s mother for more than forty years.

  “What—”

  “Sorry to burst in like this,” Zoya said. “Mama’s in trouble. I must call her.”

  “What trouble? Let me call for help.” Sima tugged at the sleeve of Zoya’s solar coat.

  “No, I’ll explain later. Please, just let me call her.”

  Zoya didn’t wait for a response. She scurried into the small living room and plopped onto the couch. She pulled the Web cable out of the socket and inserted it into her slot.

  It took less than a second to establish a link. She sent a handshake request to her apartment address. The line beeped three times before her mother’s voice answered.

  «Zoya? When are you—»

  «Mama, please listen to me. Is Tavik there?»

  «We’re having tea. He and his—»

  «Mama, please. Don’t let him know anything’s wrong, but you need to get out of there somehow. Can you do that?»

  «Tell me what’s—»

  «Shhhhhh! He’ll hear you if you panic. He’ll…»

  She heard Tavik’s voice in the background and realized that her mother had answered on the old hand receiver in the kitchen instead of the Web line in the living room.

  «Is that little Zoya? Tell her to come join us for tea!»

  Her mind raced. «Tell him you need to come pick me up. Go to a police station. You can call Marina to come get you.»

  Her mother whispered, «You’re scaring me. Please tell me what’s happening.»

  Zoya put a hand to her mouth to stifle a sob. «He’ll kill you, Mama. Do what I told you, please.»

  There was a strange sound from the other end of the line, a shrill cry.

  «Hey, Zoya!» It was Tavik. «We need to talk. Come on home. Your wonderful mother will make pelmeni for us.»

  «Tavik, I need Mama to come pick me up. Sorry. We can have supper later, after…‌after Georgy gets home. Let her come get me.»

  «Uh, no, I think not. You have a package that belongs to me. Bring it to me and everything will be fine.»

  «Let Mama come get me and—»

  «You think I don’t know where you are? I put a trace on your line. My guys should…» There was a loud pounding on Baba Sima’s door. «…be there any moment. Now hand it over to them or—»

  Zoya yanked the cord from her slot. “Baba, no! Don’t open it!”

  A rough voice yelled from the hall: “Open up, bitch, if you wanna see your mama alive again. You make us come in there…”

  Zoya ran to the living room window and was relieved to see that the fire escape appeared intact. She waved a hand at Sima.

  “Hurry, Baba! We’ve got to go.”

  “Go? I don’t want to—”

  “They’ll kill you, too.” Zoya wrenched open the lock on the window and slid it open as far as it would go. The pounding on the door became more insistent. She thrust one leg through the window, twisted her body through, and dropped onto the rusty platform. She poked her head back through the window.

  “Come on!” She waved her hands frantically.

  Sima shook her head, her eyes wide. “No, I’m not going.”

  The banging on the hall door stopped. Zoya shook her head. “Sorry, Baba. I love you. Call the police!” She turned to the narrow steps descending the side of the escape. The hand rail was so rusty it looked like it might collapse if she touched it. She prayed that the steps would hold and started down. The entire fire escape shuddered and shrieked as she went.

  She kept expecting to see Tavik’s men race around the corner of the building below to intercept her. She saw that the window to the second floor apartment was partly open and lunged at it. She pushed it up, climbed through onto thick carpeting, and slammed the window shut.

  “Hey, what the hell?”

  Zoya turned to see a blue-haired old woman in a thin yellow robe standing in the doorway to the kitchen, a mug of something in one hand.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, holding up her hands. “I just…‌I’ll be going now.” She ran toward the hall door.

  “What the hell!” the woman shouted again, angrier this time.

  “Sorry!” Zoya slid the bolt and thrust open the door. The hallway was empty. She shut the door and looked both ways, trying to decide her next move. They’ll be waiting no matter which way I go. She tried to remember where she was. Second floor. Don’t know anyone on this floor. Then it hit her. The pig who’s always inviting me to have a drink with him. She’d seen him leering out his window at her many times; his apartment must be the first one off the stairs. Zoya took off running and slid to a halt at the right door. She palmed the buzzer. Be home, Pig. Please be there.

  He opened the door. The stench of stale vodka and salami washed over her. The man’s eyes widened when he saw her.

  “Please, sir, can you help me? I’m being chased.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Chased? Who’s chasing you? Cops?”

  “No, uh…‌my brother’s friends.”

  “Come on in,” said Pig, grinning. “Make yourself—”

  “Thanks!” She pushed by him. “Close the door. Hurry.”

  The trash scattered about the living room stunned her. Most of it looked like food containers and empty bottles of vodka. She stepped carefully past a half dozen bottles and plopped onto a wooden stool. A soccer match, sound barely audible, was showing on the wall opposite a stained gray couch.

  Pig picked up a half-empty vodka bottle from a stand. He turned to her and waved the bottle. “Drink?”

  She shook her head, trying hard to hide her disgust.

  The man plopped onto the couch and glared at the game. He scratched at his thinning, greasy hair and looked at her.

  “You needn’t sit so far away, you know. Couch is more comfortable.”

  “I’m fine here. Look, do you know some way I could get out of here?”

  Pig took a swig of vodka, belched. “You just
got here. They won’t find you. Relax. Come here.”

  Zoya wondered if she hadn’t escaped one problem only to find another. “I…‌I have to get out of the building. They’ll start searching apartments.”

  “What you do to these guys, they want you so bad?”

  She shook her head again. “I don’t know. They…‌they killed my brother.”

  “Whoa!” he said, leaping up from the couch. “These guys are serious, hey? I don’t need that kind of trouble.”

  Zoya jumped up, too, afraid the man was going to attack her. She held up her hands. “Please. I just need to escape. Maybe you have some friends?”

  Pig took a step toward her, a petulant look on his unshaven face. “No,” he said. “No, you go on, get out of here.”

  She circled away from him. “Please. They’ll kill me.”

  “Don’t give a fuck,” he said and lurched at her.

  She leapt back, tripped over some trash, and landed painfully on a bottle. Pig was coming for her. She winced and snatched up the bottle, hiding it behind her back as she stood. He cornered her near the door. As he reached for her, Zoya whacked him on the head as hard as she could. He grunted and collapsed to the floor.

  She stuffed a fist to her mouth, stifling a scream. He didn’t move. She dropped the bottle and ran to the window, peered carefully around the screen to look out at the parking lot. A short man in a long black leather jacket stood near one of the sky cycles. From the look on his face, Zoya could tell he was communicating wirelessly with someone.

  “Ah, God,” she murmured. There was no way to get by this guy unnoticed. She thought about Mama and felt helpless. Tavik probably hadn’t killed her yet, hoping to use her as leverage. Red and blue lights flashed in the window, and a police car settled slowly down near Tavik’s man.

  Zoya held her breath and watched as two black uniformed cops climbed out of the vehicle. Both cops shook hands with the short man in the leather jacket, and one clapped him on the back. She blew out her breath in dismay. She couldn’t hear what was being said, but Shorty kept pointing at the apartment block.

  There was a loud groan behind her. She spun and saw Pig pulling himself to his knees. She snatched another bottle as she hurried over to Pig, who was moaning and probing the wound on his head with one hand. Aiming carefully to avoid breaking his fingers, she bashed him with the bottle. This time the bottle shattered.

  “Christ!” she cried. The last thing she wanted was for him to bleed to death. She spotted some rags near the arm of the couch, grabbed them, and pressed them into the gash in the unconscious man’s forehead.

  She felt like weeping. Her mind raced, yet she couldn’t think of anything to do. She expected to hear pounding on the door at any moment. She lifted the rags and saw that the wound on Pig’s head wasn’t as bad as it first looked. He wouldn’t die. She returned to the window.

  Three young boys stood watching the flashing lights of the police vehicle, but none of the three men were in view. Zoya grabbed for the window latch. It wouldn’t budge. She pulled harder but it still wouldn’t give. She cried out and whirled around, searching the room. Her gaze landed on the wooden stool. She grabbed it and ran back to the window, knowing the men would be there again. No, just the three boys. She hefted the stool and smashed it through the window. Ignoring the shouts of the boys, she raked the stool along the bottom edge of the window to remove the remaining shards of glass, then climbed up on the window ledge and peered down at the yellowed grass below. The drop looked awfully long, but Zoya told herself this might be her only chance. She closed her eyes and let herself drop.

  Moscow

  Sunday, June 8, 2138

  11:28 a.m. MSK

  For security purposes, the autopilot of Tyoma’s Sun Lada 6 had been programmed to fly different routes for each trip to the dacha that housed the secret military R&D teams. This time the air car skimmed above the birch forest in a long semicircle to approach the base from the rear. The car slowed and began to descend just as Tyoma saw a string of lights marking the perimeter of the compound. He counted twelve cars in the lot.

  He wondered again what could possibly cause everybody to come in like this on a Sunday. Did the general figure out we are holding back on him? The thought chilled him. This research had become their whole lives. They had spent more than four decades on it. What could he do if their funding was cut off? He supposed it wouldn’t matter if they all ended up in a gulag somewhere in Siberia.

  “Door!” he cried, before the car had even settled into its spot. It slid up and Tyoma leapt out, tripped, and fell into the dirt. He cursed and muttered, “Slow down; you’re not sixty anymore.”

  A scrape on his palm reminded him of his disrupted game, and he scowled and brushed dirt from the seat of his pants. At least the guards weren’t here to see you fall, he thought, as he approached the entrance door. He put his unwounded hand onto the plate and held his eye to the iris scanner. The door hissed open.

  Tyoma hung his jacket on a peg and brushed more dirt from his clothes before heading for the labs. Arguing voices cut off instantly as he opened the door.

  “The great sorcerer Xax graces us with his presence!” There was a good-natured grin on Konstantin Sakaev’s face.

  Volodya’s sour look told Tyoma that not everyone shared his best friend’s joke. “You might try programming your apartment to allow calls from work through. Everyone else—”

  “He’s here now, Volodya. Settle down.” Dmitri Aseev was nominally the leader of the group since he outranked the others, but he rarely asserted his authority. He was a stooped man of nearly eighty. Everyone called him Big Dima, not because he was big, which he wasn’t, but because the other Dmitri was so little.

  Kostya patted the empty seat next to him, and Tyoma joined his colleagues at the conference table. He scanned the faces, searching for a clue to what this was all about. Other than Volodya’s scowl, mainly what he saw was curiosity.

  “What’s going on?” he said in English, since three of their members didn’t speak good Russian.

  Kostya nudged him with an elbow. “That’s what we’ve been asking Volodya ever since we got here, but he insisted on keeping us in suspense until everyone arrived.”

  Volodya stood and held up his hands. “All right, let’s get this over with. We’ve been robbed.”

  The room erupted as everyone began speaking over each other. Volodya flapped his arms until there was silence.

  “I came in a couple of hours ago because I had an idea and wanted to work on it. The light was on in the storage room. I couldn’t see anything wrong, so I called up the security records.” Volodya raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Computer, show us what I looked at earlier.”

  The blank wall on one side of the conference table flickered and a video feed appeared, showing the inside of the storage room. The door slid open and a security guard entered. He walked around the small room tugging on drawers and cabinets, but they were all locked. He halted near one cabinet and picked up something lying on top. The man had his back to the camera at this point.

  “That’s enough, computer,” Volodya said. He held up a hand to forestall any questions. “I checked the storage room. Someone left a stack of chips out on Friday. The computer says the last one in the room was Sasha. How many times have we told you to put the chips away, Sasha?”

  Everyone looked at the big engineer sitting at the far end of the table. Sasha Panov was a huge man with a bushy silver mustache. He shrugged and grinned. “I knew we’d just be getting them out again Monday morning.”

  “Do you know what your laziness might have cost us?” Volodya said.

  Sasha shrugged and looked away.

  “What was taken?” asked Anders Thomsen, the Danish molecular engineer, who at fifty-two was the baby of the group. They had added him to the team when he was seventeen due to his prodigious talent.

  “The guard didn’t take them all. There were four chips left,” Volodya said.
“Three combat and one recording. How many chips did you leave there, Sasha?”

  Sasha shrugged again. “I dunno. Maybe a half dozen. I’m not sure.”

  “Great,” Volodya said. “You didn’t log them, so we don’t even know what we lost.”

  Tyoma hated how Volodya always tried to boss everyone around. “Calm down. Everyone must remember what we were working on Friday evening. We should be able to figure it out. What about the other security cameras?”

  Volodya glared at Tyoma for a few moments before responding. “The guard clearly planned to rob us. He knew enough to disable security, but he didn’t know that we had the storage room on its own system. That feed was all we had, and about the only thing more it tells us is that he did it Friday night, just after eleven.”

  Big Dima stood. “Okay. We’ll figure out what’s missing soon enough. If it’s just recordings then we should be fine. The only worry is if it’s military chips he took.”

  “No kidding,” said Dagur Stefansson, the Icelandic geneticist. “If those fall into the wrong hands, we’re done.”

  “What about the guard?” asked Little Dima, the tissue engineer.

  “Can’t find him,” said Volodya. “He’s not responding. I called his supervisor and told him to track the man down.”

  Arguments broke out around the table. Tyoma turned to his friend Kostya. “He may not be worried about recordings, but I am. You did an update recording of me on Friday. I don’t like the idea of someone having a copy of me out there.”

  Kostya was fiddling with a lighter, clearly craving a cigarette; he’d had to give them up ages ago when real tobacco became rarer than gold. “What could they do with it? If they slot it, they’ll most likely kill themselves. The worst that can happen is they go insane, right?”

  “We don’t know for sure,” Tyoma said. “That’s the problem. We can’t test it on a human yet, so we have only our theories and the chimp tests to go on. There was only that one successful test, and there was something wrong with that chimp…‌mental problems. Don’t tell me you’d be comfortable having one of your recordings out there.”