A Stand-In for Dying

by Rick Moskovitz

  He would have to announce his candidacy for President. Terra had left him no choice. It would thrust him even more into the limelight, but he and his family would have the enhanced level of Secret Service protection afforded to Presidents.

  And he’d have to find a way to get to Marcus. It would have to be in person. Any other form of communication would be too vulnerable to intrusion. And if he got to San Francisco, he might also have a chance to see Lena. Even in Corinne’s bewitching presence, he’d begun to miss her deeply, another reason that triggering the exchange had begun to feel like a disastrous mistake.

  Photina was back in an hour as promised. She stood beside Ray and projected a huge holographic image of a nest of twenty-three chromosome pairs in front of them. As often as Ray had seen such images of the human genome, he retained his childish delight at its elegance and beauty. In front of him now was the blueprint of the man who’d saved Corinne. And he already had a good idea to whom it belonged.

  “So were you able to identify him?” Ray asked.

  “Yes, I was,” She replied. “His was a well-known genome, given his identity. His name is Raymond Mettler. He was the inventor of HibernaTurf.”

  “Have you told Corinne?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” said Photina.

  “Then please keep this between us for now. It would be safer for her if she didn’t know.”

  “I don’t understand. I’ve never kept secrets from Corinne.”

  “Sometimes secrets are dangerous, Photina,” said Ray. “People who don’t want their secrets to be known might kill to protect them. Corinne is safer not knowing this one. You’re just going to have to trust me.”

  Photina stared hard at his face. Corinne’s lessons about reading emotional faces had included training in lie detection. Photina’s expertise in this area had developed beyond the skills of most humans. Finally, she nodded assent.

  When Ray returned to the Ministry of Discovery, he scanned the UDB for scientific events near San Francisco. An Artificial Cognition Conference was scheduled to meet that weekend at the Four Seasons Hotel right in the heart of the city. He contacted the conference organizer and asked whether he could be squeezed into the program as a speaker.

  “I’m planning an important announcement,” Ray said as an incentive. As long as he was going to have to declare his candidacy for President, he figured he’d kill two birds with one stone and do it at the conference. That would keep Ganymede at bay for a while. Running for President wouldn’t turn him into a traitor. Only winning would. And it suddenly occurred to him that perhaps he could find a way to lose.

  The Minister of Discovery was a solid draw for any scientific conference. The teased announcement sealed the deal and he was included in the program. He’d find an opportunity to meet with Marcus. It shouldn’t be hard to find him. He was inhabiting Ray’s old life, after all. And Ray would make the trip knowing that whoever tried to kill him would be watching from the shadows for another opportunity to finish the job.

  45

  LENA COULDN’T BANISH the image of the guard in the hallway, lying face up with a hole in the middle of her forehead that went clear through the back of her head, a clean, bloodless, lethal wound. The wide open, steel blue eyes stared vacantly at the ceiling.

  The hood had been placed over Lena’s head in the elevator. It not only rendered her blind, but also blocked her access to the Universal Data Base via her MELD chip. She had no means to navigate her position except by observing with her native senses. As a journalist, she’d developed keen observational skills that she brought to bear upon her current predicament. She counted steps and did her best to keep track of turns as they walked. She listened as best she could to the street sounds muffled by the hood. Her keenest sense was her ability to smell her surroundings through the holes left in the shroud for her to breathe.

  Just as the pungent scent of Asian food wafted its way to her nostrils, a hand pushed her head down from behind and shoved her into a vehicle. Her step count was no longer relevant as the vehicle sped away from the scene. Now she attended to the motion of the vehicle, which descended steeply before leveling out for most of its course. By the time it came to a stop and she was roughly pulled to her feet, she could smell salt air.

  She was led a short way on pavement and then onto softer ground. A creaking sound erupted a few dozen feet ahead of her, reaching a crescendo as she approached. As she moved forward, the air around her began to feel damp and the ground under her feet became slippery and boggy. The creaking sound was now behind her, ending with a clank.

  She sniffed the air. The muddy organicity had the kind of familiarity that resonates with long forgotten feelings and sharpens faded memories from long ago. Lena felt herself smile, ever so briefly, despite her peril. She knew this place and perhaps could use her knowledge in some way to her advantage.

  Lena was born in the fall of 2008, the day after the investment company Bear Stearns suddenly went broke, which became part of the folklore of her family. Her father was an investment broker with another firm, but failed to escape the ripples that went through the financial world and left her parents destitute just as they were building their family. While many Wall Street executives continued to make high salaries and collect bonuses, her father had been too low in the hierarchy to merit such protected status. When he was unemployed, her mother went to work as an office manager for a medical practice while he stayed home and tried to care for their infant daughter.

  When her mother came home unexpectedly early one afternoon, she’d found her father in the bedroom with a gun to his head. There was a note by the bedside telling her that Lena was at a neighbor’s house and that he was sorry he couldn’t handle things better. She convinced him to put the gun away and he was admitted to a hospital for treatment. Over the next year, he was in and out of the hospital until he finally renounced the possibility of killing himself and committed to rebuilding his life.

  With the hospital bills on top of their other debts, her mother was unable to keep up with the financial demands from her modest salary. They wound up homeless until Lena was four. It took another five years for them to work their way out of poverty on the combination of her mother’s salary and her father’s modest income teaching economics at a community college.

  For most of the first decade of her life, Lena had either lived on the streets or spent her time scrounging on the streets along with a gang of similarly impoverished kids. They entertained themselves by exploring the nooks and crannies of the city, from the basements of the neighborhood businesses to the buildings and wharves along the waterfront. One day, they stumbled upon a pair of massive and mysterious iron doors. At the top of the doors was a space large enough to crawl through, but too high for them to reach.

  The children returned a few days later with hooks and rope. Using the door hinges as braces, they scaled the doors and descended into the darkness armed with flashlights. Once they became accustomed to the company of the rodents and raccoons that inhabited the space, it became their secret hideout where they spent hours playing and carving their names into the rock. With time they became nimble at scaling the barriers to enter the tunnel in just a few minutes. The dank atmosphere of the tunnel grew familiar and welcoming. Now Lena imagined herself surrounded again by her childhood gang.

  “If we finish her here, we could just leave her body for the rats.” The voice of one of her captors shocked her back to the reality of her present danger. The image of the dead guard in the corridor reminded her that the people who held her didn’t hesitate to kill. She felt something hard thrust against her left temple. She drew a short breath and held it, as if not breathing might somehow make her invisible.

  “First we need confirmation that Mettler’s dead,” came another voice. “Otherwise we’ll still need a hostage.” The pressure against Lena’s head subsided.

  “Can’t imagine him surviving the cyanide. We already got word that he was in the apartment. Our sentry locked him in tight. She
should be here any minute.”

  Now Lena’s breath came in short gasps and her chest felt like it was going to burst. Her relationship with Ray had long been ambivalent. But Marcus was another story. Despite the unfairness of him being ripped away from Corinne and Natasha, she was falling in love with him. The exchange had become a guilty pleasure and she desperately wanted to keep him. If he died, a good man’s life would be cruelly cut short and neither of them would have him. Sobs bubbled to the surface and threatened to strangle her within the hood.

  “If you’re going to kill me, anyway, could you at least take this off?” Lena pleaded, her words coming in choking fragments.

  “Guess there’s no harm in that,” said another one of her captors. “The tunnel walls are thick enough to keep her off the grid.” She felt the ties around her neck loosen and the hood came off. Her eyes were already used to the dark, so things around her came quickly into focus.

  Her assessment of her location was immediately confirmed. Light filtered through high arched spaces from both ends of the quarter mile long tunnel. She could see familiar niches in the contours of the walls where she and her friends had hidden various mementoes and toys. She now counted three human figures, corresponding to the three distinct voices that she’d heard through the shroud. Her sobs subsided as her attention turned to integrating the new information she now had about her surroundings.

  One of her captors took pity and freed her hands so she could wipe away her tears with her sleeve. They had nothing to lose. The tunnel was secure and she was defenseless.

  Lena tried to connect her MELD chip to the UDB, but the kidnappers had been right. There was no access to the cloud from the tunnel. Which meant that her captors were also cut off. That explained why they weren’t still in communication with their accomplice on the outside.

  The creaking sound suddenly rose behind her. She turned to see one of the huge iron doors slowly moving outward as the aging hinges squealed and groaned. A female figure appeared silhouetted against the sky and pulled the door shut again with apparent ease.

  “He got away.” she shouted from the entrance once the door was closed. Lena’s heart skipped with the hope conveyed by those words. Marcus was alive, after all, and she’d likely at least bought some time.

  “How in the world did that happen?”

  “They blew up the window with a drone and extracted him,” replied the woman, now standing directly before Lena, who recoiled in shock at her appearance. There before her was the face of the woman on the floor with the steel blue eyes, identical in all respects absent the hole in the middle of her forehead.

  Once the shock had worn off, it all began to come together. This was not the guard that had been posted outside her door. She was an identical replacement. The wound had been bloodless because no blood had ever flowed in either woman’s body. They were SPUDs and had been manufactured at the same time in the same version. Somehow, whoever had abducted Lena had been able to replace the one who had been posted to guard her with this one. Lena wondered whether this SPUD had been the one that destroyed her double and what, if anything, she might have felt when she did it.

  “Who the hell are these people?” thought Lena. And who, for that matter, were the people who’d tried to protect her? They’d just shown up at the penthouse without any explanation. Now that she knew about the exchange and Terra’s role in it, she guessed that Terra was likely behind the security detail. But her captors were a mystery. Did they have anything to do with Terra’s scheme or were they among the many people who still despised Ray for HibernaTurf?

  The four abductors moved a short distance away and conversed in whispers. Then one of them approached her.

  “You’re a lucky woman,” he said. “We’ll need you alive a while longer, at least, to help us get to your husband. Enyo will keep an eye on you here,” he added, nodding at the woman in black with the steely eyes. “I wouldn’t try anything stupid. She has five times your speed and ten times your strength. She can crush you like an insect and without a moment’s pause. You must have seen what she did to her twin back there.”

  The three remaining captors gathered up their things and left through the iron doors that faced the sea. She watched the huge door swing shut, this time with a resounding ringing sound, and heard the sound of the lock closing to fasten the enormous chain that held the doors together. Enyo stood a few feet behind her, arms folded, locking her into focus with a piercing gaze.

  Lena struggled to remember what she’d learned about SPUDs that could help her gain the upper hand. While the latest models incorporated massive data bases and advanced logic algorithms, they still acquired their intelligence by learning, just like people, and started their existences intellectually, and especially emotionally, as children. Learning from experience turned out to be the most efficient way to maximize their potential. So like children, they were programmed to be curious and to enjoy mastering new skills.

  She scanned her memory for anything in the tunnel that might be useful in defeating her android captor. She and her friends had secreted many things within the tunnel that they used in their play. Some of their games involved intricate skills that they’d honed over time. Her thoughts wandered to an item that she’d left decades before in a niche in the wall not fifty feet from where she sat. She wondered how many of her toys were still where she and her friends had left them. She walked casually toward one of the walls and ambled along its perimeter.

  “Look what I found,” said Lena, holding out an object she plucked from one of the crevices.

  “What is it?” asked Enyo.

  “It’s called a yo-yo. It’s a toy. It must have been left here by some children.”

  “What does it do?” Enyo’s gaze was now glued to the curious object.

  “Let me show you,” replied Lena, winding the string around the spool. As she began to throw the yo-yo toward the ground, Enyo recoiled momentarily, then stared as it stopped and rolled back up into Lena’s hand. The feel of the yo-yo was familiar, and she proceeded to ‘walk the dog’ along with other tricks that had once been second nature.

  “Let me try,” said Enyo, her hand shooting out for the toy. Lena removed the loop from her own index finger and fastened the slip knot over Enyo’s.

  Enyo’s first few tries were clumsy and Lena helped her wind the string back onto the spool. By the time she got it to return to her hand, the yo-yo was occupying most of her attention, leaving Lena free to wander a bit further down the wall. She felt along the wall at what would have been a child’s shoulder height until she reached another chink in the stone.

  When she reached into the crevice with her right hand, her fingers found a sturdy forked stick. At the open end of the Y, she felt the small patch of suede that was attached to the ends of the stick by two heavy rubber cords. She prayed that the rubber hadn’t dried and cracked. Her heart skipped a few beats as she ran her fingers over the cords. They were still supple to her touch and her heart resumed its normal rhythm. Within the crevice was also a small pile of smooth stones, each around an inch in diameter. She drew two of the stones from their hiding place and put them in a pocket. Then she carefully drew out the slingshot and tucked it in the waistband of her pants behind her back. As she turned back toward Enyo, who was now trying some of the tricks that Lena had shown her, she scoured her memory for more data.

  Every SPUD had a central processing device, the anatomical location of which varied, depending upon model. And every one had some way to deactivate it. Many of the earlier generation models used a combination of remote controls and manual switches, and many of these had the switches conveniently located in the small of their backs behind a cover. Lena visualized the woman with the hole in the middle of her forehead and concluded that her CPD, and Enyo’s, lay somewhere in the path of the hole.

  Enyo glanced at her as she started back in her direction, but saw nothing amiss and returned to her play. Lena was just a few feet away when Enyo turned toward her again. She drew ba
ck on the slingshot with all her strength and the missile found its mark in the center of Enyo’s forehead. The force of the blow was apparently sufficient to disrupt her CPD and she crashed to the ground, limbs askew, haphazardly twitching. Lena sprang to her side, swept her hand over the android’s spine, and located the hidden compartment. She flipped the switch. Enyo’s body stilled.

  Lena was now aware of her own breathing, coming in gasps from her burst of activity. She paused long enough for it to settle back into a regular rhythm, then took several long, deep breaths. She felt the sweat running down her face and the wetness under her arms, contrasting with the smooth dry skin she’d felt in the small of Enyo’s back.

  Tucking her trusty slingshot back in her waistband, she returned to the crevice and scooped a handful of stones into her pockets. Approaching the gates that faced the bay, she remembered the hooks and ropes that she’d used as a child to climb over them. They weren’t in the cave. But she was now taller and, thanks to an ambitious exercise regimen, stronger than she was back then, even at forty-five, capable of using the hinges as hand and footholds to scale the gate. In just a few minutes she was under the open sky and had full command of her MELD, which was broadcasting her location. She could only hope that the rescuers would get to her first.