Human

by Robert Berke

  "Mr. Smith does not store data like a computer storing data on a hard drive. Every piece of data he receives in essence makes changes in almost every part of his brain. That's just how a brain works. So these little chains and tags get inextricably intertwined with Smith's brain. When we decommission them, every part of Smith's brain, other than those which control involuntary functions, will, in essence, cease to function. That's definitionally brain death. I am sorry, but there's just no other way."

  Hermelinda again nodded that she understood.

  "Worse yet," Bayron piped in, "the brain is also highly adaptive. It adjusts for circumstances. In Elly's case he no longer mediates data. He can literally see a picture when merely presented with the data that constitutes that picture before it is converted into an image. As such, even if we put him in a robot body, and sat him at a keyboard, with no hard wiring, he would still get infected."

  "We could put him in a robot?" Hermelinda asked.

  "Maybe one day," Bayron answered gently looking into Hermelinda's eyes and noticing for the first time that they were blue, "but there are bandwidth problems with that and..."

  Smith interrupted, "Can we get back to the subject here please. We were just talking about killing me and I apologize if I find that to be a more interesting topic. You can explain the bandwidth problems to Hermelinda on your own time."

  Sharky gladly regained control of the meeting.

  "Now I also gave a lot of thought to the keying system for your protection Mr. Smith. Everybody but you will have a dual verification: both a passcode and an iris scan. Mr. Smith only gets a passcode because I can't do a biometric verification for him. He has no biology. Also, because of where he is we don't really have to worry about him being Kidnaped and interrogated for his passcode."

  At this, Hermelinda reacted with a startled move. "What?" She asked.

  Sharky remembered that she was not an engineer. "Sorry, Hermelinda, that sounds scary, I know, but engineers have to base their decisions on worst case scenarios. In this instance, I wanted to make sure that no one else could obtain a key other than the four of us. To do that I had to think of every possible scenario wherein someone else could potentially obtain one of the four keys. I'm not saying there's any reason to believe that will happen. Between the two keys necessary to activate the kill sequence and the dual verification for each key, this system is secure from any realistic scenario."

  Smith chimed in, "Unless of course someone Kidnaped and tortured two of you to get your passcodes and then cut out your eyes for the iris scan."

  Sharky put his hand on Hermelinda's shoulder as a gesture of reassurance. "Like I said Mr. Smith, I made it secure from realistic scenarios. Only the people in this room even know about this system and I don't think any of us are blabbing."

  "Are we all sworn to secrecy then?" Smith asked.

  "I am, darling." Hermelinda said first.

  "Me too," Sharky followed.

  Hermelinda and Sharky looked at Bayron as Smith's camera slowly rotated in Bayron's direction. "You all know that I'm not entirely comfortable with this whole thing," Bayron said. "Look, the same as Sharky said about realistic scenarios is the same with this whole system. Sharky, I know that you worked hard on this and I know that I am only here at your insistence. But, no system is foolproof. If we all keep our word to keep our secret to the death, there is still a possibility that we haven't considered all of the possibilities. I mean, seriously, the higher the consequences the lower the tolerance for error. I don't mean to be selfish in this, but if something goes wrong, I get blamed, don't I?"

  Smith responded curtly, "Doc, you knew the risks when we started. As far as anyone knows you're a mental patient in a mental hospital. SmithCorp bears 100% of any liabilities for this and I am personally more than happy to engage legal to make sure there is a record of your objection. Besides, the order came from me and no one else."

  "Also, Elly, you are authorizing us to kill you. You do understand that, don't you?"

  "That is why I only have people here who I trust to make the right decision. I'm already dead by any accepted definition of that term anyway. My ‘life,' if a court would even recognize it as such, has been in your hands for a long, long time any way. I have tried to make my frustration clear. But now let me make it perfectly clear. I would far rather be dead than locked up in this closed system for eternity."

  A moment of silence lingered heavily in the still air of the office.

  Elly let it linger. "Put me online, Mr. Ohangangian." he finally said.

  Dr. Bayron shot him a dirty look, but Sharky didn't notice it. "We can get the keys assigned and have you surfing the ‘Net by tomorrow," he said. Sharky picked up his black box and the three of them walked out of the office together.

  Sharky headed straight for the lab. Hermelinda was eager to pick up Ellen from the babysitter. But Bayron just stood still in the hallway outside of the office door. Hermelinda noticed that he was just standing there with a blank look in his eyes. He didn't even seem to be breathing. She recognized this look from her years as a psychiatric nurse. He sounded so smart during the conference that she had almost forgotten about his psychosis. "Are you okay?" She asked.

  "I don't know where to go," Bayron replied.

  She took him by the arm and began walking with him down the hall. "Then come with me." She said, neither waiting for nor expecting a reply. The fresh air will do him good, she thought.

  They drove with the windows open as it was an unusually mild day for the season, she turned onto Route 7 and headed into Niskayuna and the Tall Oaks Garden Apartments. Hermelinda pulled into one of the parking spots and instructed Dr. Bayron to wait in the car. He dutifully complied. Hermelinda returned a few minutes later with Ellen, already four months old, in her arms. She opened the back door to the car and placed the baby in the carseat. Dr. Bayron watched this with a smile on his face, taking pleasure in the pureness of the moment.

  "She's getting big." Bayron said.

  "Yes," Hermelinda agreed as she drove back towards Schenectady and her duplex on Eastern Parkway. She parked in the driveway and opened the backdoor to get the baby out and said to Dr. Bayron, "Come on in." They walked together to the front door. Hermelinda was struggling to open the door while holding Ellen against her hip when she felt a weight unexpectedly lift. Dr. Bayron had taken the baby and was holding her in his arms. They were smiling at each other. She knew Ellen would soon be dozing off to sleep in his arms.

  Upon entering the apartment, Hermelinda took the now sleeping Ellen back and laid her down in a bassinet. She watched her sleeping baby for a few moments and then turned her attention back to her friend and patient. He was just standing there, numb, exactly as she had seen him outside of Smith's office earlier. "Sit." She said motioning to the couch.

  Bayron sat, as instructed, while Hermelinda made instant coffee in the microwave. She came back with two cups of coffee and handed one to Dr. Bayron. She sat next to him and turned on the television set. "I'm always so tired now that I have Ellen. I'm like a single mom, you know."

  Bayron put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her head toward his chest. Like Ellen, she fell asleep in his arms. Bayron held her in his arms until he too fell asleep.

  At 7:00 a.m. the next morning the continental breakfast at the Hampton Inn on State Street in downtown Schenectady had barely been touched. Vakhrusheva had been in the hotel lobby for half an hour and had seen only two people go near it. He himself had a bowl of thin oatmeal and a glass of cranberry juice but nothing else looked at all edible to him. Bobby arrived with a brown paper bag. "I got us some bagels," he said producing a toasted onion bagel with cream cheese and handing it to Vakhrusheva. He extracted another for himself and took a bite.

  Vakhrusheva stood up, still holding his bagel and said, "We'll eat in the car. I want to talk to our inside person."

  "You're gong to like her, Mickey. She's a real pro." Bobby said enthusiastically turning left onto the Washington Boulevard Extens
ion. "We both worked double for ISI before we got burned. That's how your boss knows us."

  Vakhrusheva was aware that Kovaretsky had dealings with the Pakistani government, but this piece of information was new and interesting. It made him all the more confident in Kovaretsky's power and influence, even though he had already been pretty well convinced of that. Nonetheless, this revelation from Bobby was somewhat astounding.

  The ISI is the national intelligence agency of Pakistan. The ISI, as far as anyone knew, was the most secure and largest intelligence agency in the world. It was legendary for never having had a double agent. Vakhrusheva now knew that "fact" to be untrue. Both Bobby and Kovaretsky's contact within SmithCorp were working "double," which Vakhrusheva easily understood as meaning that they were using the information they were privy to at the ISI for the benefit of some foreign entity. That Kovaretsky had managed to turn, not one, but two ISI agents, was beyond remarkable. It was unbelievable. And yet, Bobby's skills as evidenced by the dossiers he had prepared and the equipment he had procured were certainly indicators that he had a world class intelligence background. Double, Vakhrusheva figured, could even be off by a degree or two. It was not inconceivable that Bobby was still working for the ISI and Kovaretsky only believed that he had been turned. This type of figuring was an asset in his business.

  "My boss, as you call him, has bakeries everywhere," Vakhrusheva said. He was not at all comfortable speaking even in Bobby's Town Car. "His competitors also have bakeries everywhere, my friend." He hoped this statement would convey to Bobby that he didn't think it was wise to talk about what they were up to any more than necessary.

  Bobby pulled into the parking lot at the Daughters of Sarah nursing home. "My partner volunteers here a few days a week. She cares for a patient named Selma Oronov, the mother of one Mikhael Oronov. Selma has advanced stage Alzheimer's disease and only speaks in Russian. Your story is that it's been at least 20 years since you last saw her, Micky, so go pay a visit to your ‘mother.' I'll be here when you're done."

  Vakhrusheva got out of the car, again impressed by the amount of preparation, thought and legwork that had gone into the preparation for his mission in the United States. He was extremely impressed with Bobby. Kovaretsky was clearly skilled at finding the best and the brightest for every job. Vakhrusheva did not turn around when he heard Bobby's car vroom out of the parking lot of the nursing home. He walked through the front door and introduced himself to the receptionist as Mikhael Oronov . The receptionist gave him a pass to clip to his shirt and pointed him down the hall and to the left to Room 213.

  Vakhrusheva had killed countless men in his life, many with just his hands. He had witnessed desecrations and demolishments of the human body with enough blood and gore for a weekend long horror movie festival. He had seen as many dead bodies as a mortician: hanging bodies, starved bodies, rotting bodies, smashed bodies, dismembered bodies, even some partially devoured bodies. He had never been bothered by what he did or what he saw and this made him particularly good at his job. There are men, they say, who would kill you just as soon as look at you. Vakhrusheva was one of those men. He could put a knife in the heart of a childhood friend and go back to eating his sandwich without so much as batting an eye. He marveled at the sickness he felt in his stomach as he walked down the long hallway to Room 213. There was an odor, a horrible odor, not feces exactly but more like fermenting feces. Not urine exactly but more like stagnating urine. Mixed in with those odors were the smells of bleach, ammonia, and witch hazel. The forced air from the air conditioner stirred these smells together into a nauseating fog and Vakhrusheva tried hard, but helplessly, to ignore it.

  Room 213 was no less disturbing. He had killed, but also for a reason--not always a good reason, but always a reason. He had tortured men, but never without cause-- not always a good cause, but always a cause. Who, he wondered could ever be so cruel as to do to a person what life had done to poor Selma Oronov. For anyone who had seen her, the mere threat of her fate would be an unmatched torture sufficient to break any man. Yet no man, even if he had the means, could ever do this to another person, not even he.

  Selma Oronov's eyes were sunk deep into her eye sockets and covered with a yellowish film. Her eye sockets themselves made up nearly the entirety of her sallow face, her cheekbones, were visible through her wrinkled, but almost transparent skin. Her head was moving ever so slightly to the left and to the right. She was making sounds: soft, barely audible sounds. She had a sheet pulled over her so that only her head was exposed. Vakhrusheva could see an IV drip leading under the sheet. He leaned in close to see if he could hear what she was saying. "Pozhalui'sta, pomogite mne," she repeated over and over, "Pozhalui'sta, pomogite mne, Pozhalui'sta, pomogite mne." She turned and fixed her gaze on the large man who was standing over her, "Pozhalui'sta, pomogite mne," she said to him.

  He turned when he heard a friendly voice behind him say "You understand Ms. Selma, I know!"

  "Excuse me?" Vakhrusheva said as he turned to face the new visitor to room 213.

  "I said, this lady, you understand her. You her son. They tell me she have son come to visit from Russia. She say over and over and over like ‘pasta, pomegranate, money' but I don't know. You tell me what she saying."

  "She's saying, ‘please help me' in the dialect of our village. She's in pain. Isn't there anything you can do? I hate to see my mother like this. I don't even think she knows who I am." Vakhrusheva said, carefully playing his role until he knew he could confirm that this was his contact.

  "I'm sorry, Mister. She has maximum amount of morphine the State allows. I wish we could do more. Alzheimer's is a terrible disease. I have some of her effects," she continued as she handed him a shopping bag, "she wanted me to give these to you for safekeeping."

  "And you are?"

  "They call me Alice," Alice said with a smile. "I expected you to be younger."

  "I've gotten old, Alice." Vakhrusheva said, again completing the code and confirming his identity for his contact. "I need to get the lay of the land. I've read the briefing folders. Can you get me in?"

  "Maybe, maybe not. It won't be easy," Alice said. "There's a photo album in the bag I just gave you." She waited for him to pull the album out of the bag. He handed it to her and she positioned herself near Selma Oronov's head. She motioned for Vakhrusheva to stand next to her. From this angle she was easily able to see out the open door and it looked very much like she was showing Selma's son some of Selma's photographs. She opened the photo album and continued speaking while pointing to the pictures in the album. "This is the visitor's and administrative employee's entrance. They call it the big door. There are two security guards posted right behind this door 24/7. Employees show their ID cards to the guards, as they pass. The guards all pretty much recognize everyone. Occasionally there will be a new guard who will check every ID meticulously, but most days its pretty slipshod. Everyone who doesn't have an ID card is supposed to sign in with the guards and the guards will call an escort to bring the visitor to whatever department he is visiting. If you don't have an appointment, the protocol is to foist you off on PR and they'll either give you a guided tour or get rid of you quickly enough.

  "Over here, on the North side," she said, pointing to another photograph, "is the R & D entrance. To get in this entrance, you need a magnetic card. There are some labs on the first floor, but those labs are mostly for continuing stress tests on existing products. These are the labs that the tour groups get to see. But at the end of this hall," she said, pointing to another photo, "is a bank of elevators. These are accessible by biometrics only. No visitors allowed. The infirmary, Bayron's lab, and most of the computers that run Smith's brain are on the sixth floor. The sixth floor is off limits to anyone who is not directly involved in the brain project."

  She turned to the back page of the album which had a floorplan of the sixth floor spread across the two pages. "This is the infirmary. It's basically a hospital room. Very secure. This is Bayron's lab. This is the con
trolled environment room where the computers are. The lab is where Ashkot's brain scans were parsed. His scans are resourced as ‘Source Two data' on the servers, but for some reason all of the techs refer to him as Flat Stanley or Flat Stanislav."

  Vakhrusheva chuckled a little when he heard his old colleague referred to in this way. How could these Americans ever understand the great power that lay in those scans. The power to destroy the world was somewhere on that floorplan. "Go on," he said.

  "Smith maintains a separate office on the Executive Floor, which is the seventh floor, where he can interface with people without having to bring them to the sixth floor. He actually holds most of his meetings in that office, which is here. The executive offices are the only offices that are accessible from both the main entrance and the R&D entrance."

  "Is there anything else that wasn't included in the dossiers?" Vakhrusheva asked.

  "Well, there is something that I am still working on. It has to do with a black notebook that Dr. Bayron took handwritten notes in. I mentioned this before. When he disappeared, I searched the lab and hospital room. I searched everywhere for that notebook. I think its very important-- I'm sure it has the information in it that Bayron didn't want made public. When Bayron came back to SmithCorp from the mental hospital, the notebook was not among his effects. I have a feeling, call it an instinct, that we wouldn't be able to replicate this project without the information in that notebook."