by Dom Testa
Quanta’s assistant and also the contact person for field agents was new, and she was probably a wonderful person if I got to know her. But it’s hard to get chummy with the person who makes the reservation to your execution.
I know it’s not Poole’s fault; she simply does her job. But you have to give Q2 operatives the freedom to vent against someone, and if it’s Quanta you run the risk of her breaking your face with her heel. Poole couldn’t do that.
As far as I knew.
She was in the tiny break room heating something in the gross microwave. No matter how many Your Mother Does Not Work Here signs were tacked up, no one would ever treat an office microwave with anything even remotely resembling respect.
“Hello, Poole,” I said. When she turned around, it was fun watching her scan my new face, trying to attach a name. I helped her out. “Swan.”
“Oh, right. How are you liking —” She vaguely gestured at my body. “—this?”
I glanced down, looking for whatever had prompted that expression on her face. “Well, it’s scrawnier than I would’ve liked.” I looked back at her. “I don’t get to shop for them, Poole. I have to live with whatever those idiots on the second floor acquire. And this time they acquired—” I repeated her gesture. “—this. You have a package for me?”
She held up a finger, the international ‘hold on’ signal. The gross microwave had beeped and she removed what must’ve been leftover spaghetti in a rectangular Tupperware container. She stirred it, blew on it, and tried a sample. Next came the waving hands, the universal sign for ‘hot hot.’
“I’ve got it in here,” she said, walking out and taking another tentative bite of her late lunch.
Poole was probably 30 or 31; I never asked. She was tall and fit, hair and clothes out of an Olan Mills photograph. She struck me as curt, focused, and mostly humorless, but not because she was a snob. I just don’t think she understood the point of humor. Believe me, when we first met I served up some damned good material and got back blank stares. Which only made me try harder. Maybe it’s childishly competitive, but I’m determined to one day get Poole to laugh at something, even accidentally.
Besides all that I was told she was competent as hell, and if Quanta liked her that’s all that mattered.
Poole reached her small office and sat down as she handed me a manilla envelope from her desktop. I took the only other chair in the office and held it up to my head, like a mentalist.
“I’m going on a long sea voyage,” I droned. No reaction from Poole. I opened the envelope and looked at the travel itinerary. “Dammit, wrong again! Las Vegas. Not even close to the sea. I’ll keep practicing.”
“Didn’t the boss tell you it was Las Vegas?”
“She may have, but she had also just kicked me in the head. I don’t retain well after blunt-force trauma.” I pulled out another page. “Suite at the Encore. Mercedes rental. I can live with this.” I looked up at Poole. “Well, I’ll try to live with it. Lately that’s been a challenge.”
“Your cover demands opulence.”
“What?”
“Your identity is that of a high-stakes negotiator. To be believable you’ll need the best of everything.”
“Oh, right, opulence.” Another page from the folder. “I’m . . . Conrad Dean, with Locker-Mann Holdings. Poole, I hate it when you guys give me a name that’s two first names. Nobody trusts anyone with a first name for a last name.”
When Poole scowled, trying to digest if this was a fact, I moved on. “Well, Locker-Mann is a real investment firm. I take it I’ve been properly entered into all of their databases?”
“You’ve been with the firm 11 years, and your digital footprint is not only wide, but deep. When the security people at LoGo search your name an impressive list will come up.”
That’s something I could never find fault with at Q2. Some of the gadgets they’ve given me in the past were wonky, but we’ve got some of the finest digital freaks ever hatched. Order up a fake identity and they’ll create a person who seems more real than your sister.
“All right,” I said, stuffing everything back inside the envelope. “What about my gear?”
She handed me a small box and said, “Two phones with monitoring hubs installed, series-8 business cards. Some standard computer tap circuits. Your weapon will be delivered to you at the hotel. You’ve been using a Glock 18. Would you like another of those?”
“Yes, please. Sorry I didn’t bring back the last one. Of course, I didn’t bring myself back, either. Which is too bad. I think you liked the old me better.”
She studied my face. “I don’t know enough details about the investment program. I understand that you walked out of here last month as one person and you’re back as another.”
“Would you like to know more?” I asked.
“I’m not sure I’m allowed to know more,” she said.
“According to your boss, you are.” I shifted in my seat. “You know what it is, so how about I tell you how it’s done?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll give you the abridged version,” I said. “The reason it’s called ‘investment’ is because they’re essentially putting something in and hoping to get a reward out of it later. So they invest a different body with my mind.”
“But I know that much,” Poole said.
“Okay. Well, to do that they have to have my mind stored somewhere, right?”
“Yes.” She was dying to know.
“It’s not glamorous,” I said. “The basement.”
She scowled again. “The basement where? Here? I don’t think there’s a basement in this building.”
“Oh, there is. Very few people know about it, and now you’re in the club. About the highest security you’ll find in this town, outside the White House and the Capitol, guarding a basement. Forty feet below street level, a vault containing a lab, a row of morgue drawers, and super-cooled supercomputers. And that’s where my little mind lives. A shit-ton of ones and zeroes.”
“That’s really quite incredible,” she said.
“When it’s time to put me in someone else, they roll a body out of one of those drawers, put the goddamndest Buck Rogers helmet on it, flip a switch, and download my sparkling personality into a new vessel. Quanta calls me a Frankenstein’s monster. Not too far off, actually.”
“Incredible,” Poole repeated.
“The only problem,” I said, “is keeping me current. So as often as possible I have to upload myself to the supercomputers. If I upload at 5 o’clock and get killed at 6, that last hour is wasted. Some of us call it the lights-out period. It’s all in the dark. Which is why we don’t know what happened to me at the end in Utah. My last upload had been four or five hours before I bit the dirt.”
“Then how do they know you, um, how you . . .”
I watched her struggle and enjoyed every second of it. She obviously didn’t want to be blunt, but I waited another few seconds before finishing the thought for her.
“How do they know I’ve been murdered? When I’m downloaded into a new body, my brain also has a sort of wave-tracker. When the waves stop arriving at this lovely home base, it means there’s no power in the battery.”
She seemed to think this over. “Are you consciously aware in the computer? I mean, you’re essentially two places at once.”
“Now Poole, that’s a great question. No. Human consciousness can exist on its own, but it has no real awareness outside of a body. It takes an actual brain to put all the pieces together.” What I didn’t add, of course, were my concerns about what wasn’t getting transferred and reassembled.
There’s a theory that our memories are suspect. When you think back to something your friend did to you in elementary school, there’s a good chance that memory is faulty. Something you’ve been told for years gets rewired as an actual memory — you’d swear it happened, but it didn’t. Your mind created a file from fiction, or at best a second-hand account, realistic as hell, and you’d never k
now the difference.
So I often wondered how many of my memories were actually surviving intact from one investment to the next. Did I really jump from the top of that urgent care facility, or did my brain invent it? It’s unnerving for the average person to think their memories could be bullshit; it’s even worse for an invested agent like me when those images are copies of copies.
But I couldn’t share this with Poole. She’d been fed enough mind-numbing details for one evening. I stood up and stretched. “That’s a simple way of explaining everything. But I’m beat. I’m going home. I’ll tell you more next time.” I waved the envelope at her. “Thank you for this. If the twins at LoGo are planning to short-circuit a city’s power supply, Q2 will swoop in to the rescue. Watch, we’ll go to all this trouble and the target will be a town of 1,500 people somewhere in the boonies.”
“But what if it’s a city like Chicago or New Orleans?” Poole asked.
I chuckled. “Then it’s my job to save Mardi Gras. Can’t have people puking in the dark, right?”
Just as I got to the door she called out. “Swan, do you mind if I ask a personal question?”
“Poole, are you hitting on me?”
“What? No. Not that kind of personal question.”
“Go ahead.”
She took a moment and I figured something really good was coming. And it was. In her very proper manner she asked: “Swan, what’s it like to die?”
I just stared at her for about ten seconds, then grinned. And walked out.
Chapter Four
I drove home with the window down but no music playing. I had too much to think about.
Poole’s innocent question had struck my most sensitive nerve. The grin I’d flashed her was a mask.
In my job you get killed. You just do. I can’t watch secret agent movies anymore because every single one of them, from James Bond to Ethan Hunt to Jason Bourne to whomever — they never get killed. That’s total bullshit! Only in Hollywood do bad guys miss with machine guns. In real life, your ass is cut down. And those epic car crashes? You don’t get up and walk away just shaking your head. Your head is probably severed.
So I’ve been killed a lot, never mind the actual number, and sometimes more than once on a single case if it drags out long enough. That’s frustrating as hell. It’s like playing the Legend of Zelda and making it all the way to Ganon in that last dungeon, only to get screwed and have to start the level over.
But in all those cases I never get to see the final scene. I mean, I obviously see it at that moment, but my deaths have always been in the lights-out period. There’s zero memory of it. It’s erased. Just like I don’t know exactly how I bite it, I don’t know what that experience is like.
And that pisses me off.
Strange reaction? I don’t know. There were only four of us in Q2 who were invested, four of us who took on the most difficult assignments where we not only risked our lives, we gave them. Of the four I’ve got seniority, both in time served and the number of carcasses piled up. I wanted to know what that experience was like. I wanted the scientist who created this technology to figure out a way for me to continually upload so that moment was recorded.
I once made the mistake of mentioning this to Quanta.
“What is it about the ‘experience’ you’re so curious about?” she’d asked. We’d finished a workout — another ass-kicking, yes — and were drinking green tea in her garden.
This had been my chance to downplay the interest. Instead I engaged with her intellectually about something that almost got me expelled from the program.
“Wouldn’t you be curious?” I said. “We’ve made advances in everything from medical science to genetics engineering. We’ve extended the human lifespan, we’ve improved quality of life for most people. But still we know nothing about the one thing that haunts every one of us. It’s still the biggest mystery of all. And we know zilch.”
“But we now have the science to defeat it,” Quanta said.
I scoffed. “We’re not defeating it. We’re cheating it, and only temporarily at that. We’re hitting the reset button and extending the game a little bit longer, that’s all. You’ve read the reports; with each investment there’s a penalty, a sliver of me that gets corrupted. I can’t do this forever.”
“With any technology there are advances. Within the next five years those slivers could be saved.”
I shook my head. “It’s already beyond comprehension that we can do this much. Evolution will not tolerate an immortal being.”
She sat forward. “Is that what you think you’ve become? Immortal?”
“No, Quanta, and that’s my point. I am getting killed. My original body — hell, I can hardly remember what it even looked like — was cremated years ago. My thoughts might have the potential for immortality, but that’s not the same thing. I’m like an app being downloaded on one phone after another. How long until the app itself is useless? Q2, or whatever it morphs into, won’t always want the essence of Eric Swan doing its work. It’ll want someone fresh, someone whose mind experiences don’t have such an ancient baseline. And then what happens to me? I’ll either be left in my last body to naturally age, or I’ll be killed somewhere and . . .”
Quanta’s eyes had taken on her look of anger. “You think when we’re finished using you we’ll just wait until you’re killed somewhere and then dispose of your mind in the lab?”
Oh, man. I’d said too much again. I looked down at my mug of tea. “No, I suppose not.”
She stayed quiet, long enough to let me know she was peeved. I’d inadvertently questioned her honor, when all I’d meant to question was Q2’s honor.
Finally she spoke again. “You’ve talked a lot, but without answering my question. Why do you want to remember the experience?”
I was grateful for the redirect. I sat back and crossed one leg over the other. “You hired me because I was alone.”
Quanta raised a finger to correct me. “I hired you because of your military training and mostly because of your psychological profile.”
“And because I was alone. You’d never hire anyone with a family. Then you’d have to let the world know we have the ability to do this. And you — along with the small group of other people who know about it — have made it clear this technology will never be discovered by the public.”
“For very good reasons,” she said.
I shrugged. “Which we can debate another time. But the fact is, all four of your agents are complete loners with no family, no one close to them. They’ve fallen off the Earth without a single person noticing.”
“All right.”
“And you know why I was alone. You did your homework on me. You know what happened to me.”
“Swan—”
“That’s why I want to experience it. I want to know exactly what they experienced. I want to know if I should truly grieve for them, or rejoice for them.”
Quanta looked hard into my eyes. “And this is why you agreed to join us? For this?”
I released a long sigh. “No, Quanta. It’s not the reason why. But after you’ve been killed this many times, after you’ve been over that threshold and then yanked back without so much as a glance . . .” I didn’t finish.
“You weren’t religious when you joined Q2,” she said slowly. “Has that changed?”
“Call it what you want, religious curiosity or scientific curiosity. They’re the same at this particular point. This is where they converge, whether either side wants to admit it or not. This is the ultimate intersection of faith and reality.”
Now, as I drove into the parking garage of my building, I wondered if Quanta still thought about that conversation as much as I did.
Which was a stupid thing to wonder. Quanta forgot nothing. And if she ever thought I was really preoccupied with these questions, I’d be done.
Who’s to say that would be a bad thing?
I trudged up the stairs of the Stadler Building to the 7th floor, along the
way texting Christina to let her know I was home. I also gave her the password. When you look completely different as often as I do, the people in your life need to know it’s really you. The first time it happened Christina and I wasted a lot of time while I proved it was me. A password is easier.
The stairwell opened up next to my unit, #700. Punching in the key code, I opened the door and immediately felt the satisfaction of home wash over me. Maybe your house or apartment is just a place where you sleep at night. But I don’t even get to look at the same face in the mirror for very long, so home to me is more than an address. It’s one of my only constants.
I crossed to the kitchen and pulled a bottle of Ketel One from the freezer. I made two vodka-sodas, then carried them both into the living room and pulled the shades back. Dusk had set in and the view grounded me. Plenty of trees, a small waterway, and few people. Perfect.
Taking a sip from my drink I heard the wall panel opening behind me but kept my attention on the scene outside the window. A moment later I felt Christina’s eyes scanning me up and down, and turned to give her the first look at the new me.
“You like?” I asked, striking a profile pose and dramatically running my free hand down my side and leg.
“Not particularly,” she said. I hadn’t married her for her brutal honesty, but it was part of the package.
I picked up the second cocktail and handed it to her. “Yeah, well, I’m not crazy about this one either.”
She accepted the drink and we clinked glasses. “By far the thinnest one yet,” she said. “What’s the worst tat?”
“Back right shoulder. An owl.”
“An owl?”
“An owl that looks like Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Not intentionally, I’m sure. Oh, and a misspelled word on the upper right chest. We’re pretty sure it was supposed to be ‘Liberty,’ but they left off the T.”
She took a drink. “Libery. Maybe they were trying to write ‘Library.’”