Human

by Robert Berke

  The steaks came on sizzling plates. Kitty was glad that she had something to do besides answer questions. Gonzales, motioned to the waiter to bring another round of drinks. "Oh, that smells good," Gonzales said, smiling at Kitty and cutting into his steak.

  "I am sooooo hungry," Kitty admitted.

  "So how did you get involved in this whole thing?" Gonzales asked, giving Julian a moment to eat some of his steak.

  Kitty answered between bites, "Oh, that's kind of a long story. I don't want to embarrass anyone."

  "We're both big boys here, Kitty," Julian reassured her. "Bill, knows that I sometimes go to the Moviestar.

  "Okay," Kitty said, "I'll tell you, but you both have to promise not to put anything about this in your article. Okay?"

  "Scout's honor," Gonzales replied, smiling.

  "I promise," Julian said.

  Kitty proceeded to relay in some detail the story of how she was working at the Moviestar Topless club, about the regular customer there who she only knew as ‘Sammy the Lawyer'. She told them about reading the message from Elijah Smith that Elijah Smith was dead, about how all of the customers were checking out Myra, about the laptop with all of the little lights and attachments, about Frieda at the bar, and about having been asked to dance for the little computer. She told them how Myra had given her $700 that day and asked her to babysit Sammy and how she ran out after Sammy to do what she had promised to do.

  On the far side of the restaurant, Josey Cruz, sitting alone enjoying his own prime cut of beef while pretending to read a magazine and listening through a tiny earpiece, chuckled to himself as he imagined Kitty, in full stripper garb, running after the drunk attorney.

  Meanwhile, Hermelinda brought Dr. Bayron down to the infirmary which had been built specifically for Elly Smith at the SmithCorp Building. She was glad it was being put to good use again as she led the doctor to the hospital-style bed. She cradled his head in her arms and pulled it to her chest in a warm, maternal hug. Bayron was distant and non responsive to her gesture. Hermelinda said, "Stay here and rest for a while, Doug. I'll come back with some lunch for you, okay?"

  Dr. Bayron looked past her and nodded.

  As Hermelinda left the room, Bayron slipped his shoes off and stretched out on his back on the adjustable bed and fixed his eyes on the ceiling above him. I'm not the same, he thought to himself, I'll never be the same. He did not know if he would stay awake or fall asleep. Neither option seemed attractive to him.

  "It's nice to have a room mate, Doug." Smith's voice, ever becoming more refined and human, sounded from the speakers.

  Bayron was startled by the voice and turned his head. "I forgot you were still plugged-in to this room," Bayron said.

  "Oh yeah, I don't mention it much. Nothing's really happened here since they hauled my body away. Mostly I meet people in my office on the 7th floor now. Alice cleans and reads her romance novels. Hermelinda comes sometimes with the baby to check the equipment and supplies. Still, it is fun to have two sets of eyes and two sets of ears though."

  Bayron turned his gaze back to the ceiling. "You told me you were bored," Bayron said, "I guess you weren't kidding."

  "Well, I guess its something like island fever. When you run out of places to explore, the mind just invents ways to keep itself occupied. It makes up all kinds of entertaining ideas."

  "I have some idea what it feels like to be trapped in your own head," Bayron sighed.

  Smith's brain, operating at the speed of light, worked through a number of emotional reactions to Bayron's remark in an instant. There was anger: he cannot even imagine what it means to be trapped in a machine! There was pity: the Doctor is a scared and sick man. There was even some sense of empathy: they were both locked within their own minds; Bayron in his biological mind and Smith in his mechanical one. Smith decided that all of these feelings were valid but ultimately irrelevant.

  Did Dr. Bayron know about the Russian names and Code number 3? Had Dr. Bayron sold out? Was someone else paying him to get that information? Was that why he didn't want me to be able to access the Internet? That's what Smith really wanted to know about his new room mate. He wanted to be able to trust him again. Until he could get out onto the internet, at least, he would have to settle for extracting what he could from whomever he could. Smith hoped that these new worries and new paranoias were just a function of a lonely and bored mind. Bayron too may have those feelings. It would be best, Smith reasoned, to put his fears on hold and reestablish the rapport and the trust that he had with his friend before they had each entered their own isolated universes.

  "What happened to you, Doug?" Smith asked.

  "You used to call me, Doc," Bayron responded.

  "No offense intended, Doc." Smith said apologetically.

  Bayron smiled a little and turned to face the camera. "Actually, I'd rather just be Doug for the time being, Elly."

  "You used to call me Smith." Smith said, "but I'm happy to be Elly now." Bayron turned onto his back again and renewed his fixed gaze at the ceiling of the room. "So, tell me," Smith persisted, "what happened?"

  "It's a long story, Elly." Bayron sighed.

  "I've got nothing but time, Doug. I'm immortal, remember?" A crackle from the speaker accompanied the synthetic voice.

  Bayron sighed a long sigh. He had told this story many times in the past two weeks and he had never told it before then. He understood, because Dr. Beedle had told him that he understood, that the history he was about to relate was what caused his breakdown. He sighed again, knowing that in the remembering lay the pain. But Dr. Beedle said that telling what happened would be therapeutic. Bayron was determined to be a good patient. Or is that the drugs? he wondered.

  It took one more sigh and a deep breath before he was able to speak. "It actually started before the European Quail project."

  "We are the Brotherhood of the Quail, are we not?" Smith interjected suddenly feeling very close to Bayron again.

  Bayron sighed again. "I had a wife and son." he said. "My little boy, Eric, died of Leukemia when he was five years old. His mother, my wife, was killed in a car accident just one month after. And I know why." Bayron swallowed hard and took a deep breath. "Because her eyes were filled with tears and her mind was full of memories."

  "I'm sorry." Smith said, but there was little comfort in the mechanical voice despite its evolving refinement.

  Bayron continued, "It's the body, Elly. All my colleagues in medical school, all they ever wanted to do is learn how to fix the body, learn how to prolong life in the body. But the body is frail, disposable. The flesh is the weak link. If the person could be extracted from the body, my wife, my son, would be alive today. That's why I changed my study from holographic imaging to brain modeling. I used the lab at the University as my temple, my research was my ritual, Elly. I vowed that I would never, ever quit until I could bring them back and that was my prayer. But the years have passed, those two little bodies; my wife, my child, they're dust now and their souls are in heaven. Even if I could regenerate their bodies from DNA, I could never bring them back. They wouldn't be the same."

  Bayron breathed a heavy breath. "Now we have the technology. Now we know how to do it. And it's too late. My prayer will forever be unanswered. Eric will still be dead. June will still be dead." Smith's camera-eye picked up a small river of tears coming from Bayron's eye. It was tears without sobs and it did not interrupt Bayron's story. "When we disconnected you from your body and the coroner took your corpse out of this very room...I felt compelled...I don't know why, but I felt compelled to visit their graves. When I got there, I knew why I was there. I had to apologize to them. I had to apologize for being too late to save them. I had to apologize for letting them die. I had to apologize for still being alive.

  "It was sadder for me," Bayron continued with only a moment's pause, "than if I had failed. But having succeeded, knowing that they could have been saved...that pain...that pain..." his voice trailed off as he gave up on trying to find the right
words. "I sat by his grave, Elly. I remember throwing a shovel of dirt on that grave. It was so little. He was so beautiful when he was alive. I had nothing to say. There he was, silent. I asked myself, 'why am I here? Why did I come to this place?' I am busy, I have things to do, its time to go. But another voice, another part of my own mind, said, 'stay'. You are with your wife and child and it is too long for you to have been away. You never should have let them die. You miss them, you love them, you should stay.

  "And then, it got cold and I felt hungry, and I said-- maybe to the wind-- 'I should go.' But the other voice said, 'stay', and I had no will to leave. And the sun went down, but I wasn't tired. My penance hadn't even begun. Soon, there was no voice to tell me I was cold or hungry or even tired. Just the voice that said, 'you belong here with June and Eric. Stay.' And then even that voice was gone. It just knew I was going to stay. I don't know how many days I was there. I recall the sun going up and the sun going down, but nothing else. Then there was the mental hospital, Dr. Beedle, then Hermelinda, and now I am here again. Alive. And you're here too. And neither you nor I are supposed to be."

  "I'm sorry, Doug. I didn't know. Why don't you get some rest. I'll turn off the camera and microphone for a while. Just ping me from the console if you want to talk. I'll have someone bring you some books and magazines and movies too."

  "I haven't been released, you know. Only transferred. Technically, I'm still in a mental institution." Bayron remarked.

  "You have no idea." Smith retorted.

  Bayron chuckled at his friend's attempt at levity. "I have no where to go anyway, Elly." He said.

  Smith turned off the microphone and the camera as he had promised. Alone again with his own electric thoughts. Oh how he must resent me, Smith thought. He hates me just for being alive. He regrets having created this technology. Why should I be alive while his wife and child lie six feet under? Because I am rich? What great comfort it would give him to know I'm not actually living. Perhaps I can prove to him that I'm not. Wouldn't that be a loving gesture? Smith was amused that such a loving gesture would self-defeat its purpose, after all only the living are capable of love. Could a machine even be amused by irony, or even at all? Such thoughts were actually reassuring to Smith, as they helped him to stay convinced that he was still human.

  A tall man in a Hawaiian shirt disembarked from a Southwest Airlines flight which had just come into Albany Airport from JFK. He had flown into JFK on an British Airways flight from Moscow with a Georgian Passport in the name of Mikhael Oronov. He had never been to this airport before. It seemed small to him. He saw a water fountain along the wall in the terminal and stopped to take two Tylenol. His back ached from sitting too long, his knee hurt from the humidity, and the pain in his stiffened fingers was unbearable.

  As he walked by the baggage claim, he was struck by the fact that there were no chauffeurs waiting for passengers with little cardboard signs and luggage carts at the ready. This would make it difficult for him to find his driver, he thought.

  As he waited for his luggage, he heard a loud voice call out in his direction, "Mickey! It is good to see you again, my friend. I'm glad you made it. I've got the car right outside. Let me help you with your luggage." Vladimir Vakhrusheva turned to see a man, perhaps half of his age, but shorter, skinnier, and dark-skinned. His accent was thick and inflected with hints of British English and new Orleans Creole. It bothered him that he could not place this man's origin.

  "Bobby?" Vakhrusheva said with a feigned excitement for the benefit of those around him who might have been listening or suspicious.

  "You've gotten old, Mick," the other man said completing the code that had been worked out well in advance.

  They walked in silence together to a waiting town car. "Bobby" put Vakhrusheva's suitcase in the trunk, and they drove to the Hampton Inn on State Street in downtown Schenectady. "It's a nice place," Bobby said, "there's some nice shops and restaurants and a theater just down the street. And you can see the SmithCorp Building right from your room. We can walk there even."

  "I'm going to stand out like a sore thumb in a little city like this." Vakhrusheva said.

  "Are you kidding," Bobby said, "there's Russians all over this town. This isn't the midwest. Trust me, you'll disappear here. You don't even look tall here, compared to some other places."

  They rode the elevator to the seventh floor together in silence. "You couldn't find a taller hotel than this?" Vakhrusheva asked as Bobby opened the door to a room.

  "Mickey, Mickey, relax. I've been positioned here for four years already. I got they lay of the land. You trust me. Besides, take a look out the window, this is as tall as its going to get unless you want to stay at the SmithCorp Building."

  Vakhrusheva pulled back the curtain just enough to see out of the hotel room window. Most of the buildings were quite low with the exception of one very tall, very shiny building, rising from the middle of what appeared to be a large factory operation. "All of that used to be General Electric," Bobby said. "Edison, Steinmetz, all the big guys in electricity lived here. The first commercial television broadcast happened just a couple of miles from here. Even Nicola Tesla came through here once. See you're not the first Russian to come here!"

  "Tesla was a Serb." Vakhrusheva said humorlessly as he turned his gaze toward the South until it fixed on what appeared to be another large industrial complex.

  "Ah, good eye, Mickey," Bobby said noticing where Vakhrusheva's gaze had landed. "That's the Knolls Atomic Power Lab. I'm sure your boss has some eyes on that one too. Nobody wants to know what goes on in there!"

  "I am here alone scouting locations for new Russian bakery. My boss has no interest in nuclear power lab. Only in pastry." Vakhrusheva stated matter-of-factly, hoping to G-d that this fool had the brains to have swept the room for bugs.

  "Riiiiggghhht," Bobby replied sarcastically. "So, pastry-man when do you want to go scouting?"

  Vakhrusheva permitted himself a smile, this Bobby was a little annoying, but he was his only asset at the moment. "Arrange for me to meet personally with our insider tomorrow morning. You meet me at lobby breakfast 7:00am."

  "Okay, Boss." Bobby said as he walked to the door. He turned just before leaving. "By the way, I put some samples in the room safe. I slipped the combo into your pocket at the airport. You'll find some snacks and things in the refrigerator."

  After the door closed behind Bobby, Vakhrusheva reached into his pocket and sure enough there was a slip of paper with a combination written on it. He worked the safe and the door opened to a sparkling clean Makarov semi-automatic pistol with several standard and extended clips and enough bullets to take down an army. He also found a U.S. Passport and New York Driver's license with an old picture of himself on them and the name Mikhael Oronov and what he estimated to be $10,000 dollars in U.S. twenty dollar bills. He moved from the safe to the mini-fridge. On the top shelf, laying across some cans of soda, he found a brown accordion file folder with several manila folders within it. Moving the accordion file revealed a full, unopened bottle of Imperia Vodka and two of Imperia's signature test-tube style shot glasses.

  On the bottom shelf he found a surveillance kit including several tiny remote microphones and tracking devices, a pair of high power Nikon binoculars, and to his utter relief, a recently used RF detector which still had on its display, "No signals detected." Bug free.

  "Bobby," Vakhrusheva said aloud for the benefit of his own ears alone. "That's a funny name." He glanced at the accordion file and pulled out some of the folders that were inside.

  Some of the manila folders contained dossiers on the individuals who he was likely to come across on his mission. Others contained blueprints and diagrams of different buildings. Another was a list of access codes and passwords. Vakhrusheva poured himself a shot of Vodka, but sipped it slowly as he began to commit the contents of each manila folder to his memory.

  Julian and Gonzales sat at the small kitchen table in Julian's kitchen. Josey Cruz, as the younge
st man in the room had been assigned to make the coffee. As he scooped the coffee into the drip-brewer on Julian's counter, he had a sense of Deja-Vu. The kitchen felt very familiar to him -- it reminded him of his grandmother's little kitchen in Queens. The linoleum floor, the lime green early-70's appliances, the Formica countertops, the clock with the audible ticking, and the faint smell of mothballs, all brought him back to that place and time in his life when right and wrong were easily distinguishable. There were no shades of grey in 10 year old Josey Cruz's grandmother's kitchen. In that kitchen, good guys wore white and bad guys wore black and spoke with German or Russian accents. Everything fell neatly into one category or another and when he wasn't sure, grandma Cruz could assign virtue or sin to every idea without even having to think about it. The world was that simple.

  Josey had developed a keen sense of right and wrong from his grandmother and always believed that there was a certain objectivity to the properties of "good" and "bad", no less so than there was an objectivity to the properties of "up" and "down." He rejected the idea that good was only good relative to bad or that up was only up relative to down. Up is up and down is down, and if you tell me otherwise, you are probably trying to sell me something.

  While this trait made him very unpopular in college, it was also the key to his being noticed as an exceptional field agent at the CIA and ultimately brought him to the attention of the IAEC-FOU. After all, when one is unwavering in his belief that there are objective truths to be found, he is more likely to find them. Finding objective facts was exactly why the three men had reconvened at Julian's house after meeting with Kitty.

  "Gentlemen," Gonzales said, "we have barely breached an outer circle, but I firmly believe that we may have gained information tonight which will inform our next contact. So let's get down to brass tacks. You've got the notes, Mr. Cruz, give us a quick briefing."

  Josey turned his attention from the coffee maker to a black Samsonite briefcase he had placed by his chair. "I can do better than a briefing, boss, I've already sketched an organization chart based on what we learned at the steakhouse." He pulled a piece of notepaper from the briefcase and lay it on the table. so they could all see it at once.