This was his destiny. He felt like a key fitting into a lock.
He solved the case in a blind fury.
“Wow, that was fast. Here's a category four.” A spooked out quality was in her voice. He loved that tone, sought to cultivate it in everyone he met.
At the moment, he thought of brains.
The expression “beheading” is a misnomer. The head—more accurately, the brain—is the source of consciousness and personality. You cannot “behead” a person because the head is the person. “Debodying” would be a more accurate term.
He loved the idea of cutting away one’s own body.
Imagine a saw blade going through your throat, slicing your jugular and carotid arteries, severing your vertebrae.
Imagine feeling truly cold air touching your esophagus for the first time, cold air that no longer has to pass through your mouth and nose.
Imagine making yourself a hundred, a hundred and fifty, two hundred pounds lighter, in one glorious swipe of steel.
Your head would be held upright in mid-air by pins and clips. You'd look down, and you'd see your body collapsing, dark red jets pulsing and squirting from the neck stump, just a piece of meat like it always was.
And what would you do then?
You'd augment yourself, of course. Out with the old, in with the new. Metal skin. Gleaming chrome limbs. A mechanical heart, thundering away at 90bpm for six hundred years!
Or maybe you would eschew any sort of body and become a mind connected to an extended neural system. Why not? A body is just a biological adaptation that sometimes works and sometimes fails. Not the only way to play the game.
You could connect yourself to a multi-brain, and be part of a giant neocortex the size of a building. God, how good would coke feel when your addiction circuits were a mile long?
He'd heard of a New York survivor, who had cancers systematically erupting throughout all four of his limbs. He'd become a quadruple amputee and then a man equipped with four bionic limbs.
He'd spoken of the feeling of liberation, of being free, being able to detach one of your limbs and hold it in front your face was an experience more people should have, apparently.
But his wife had left him. She'd not been able to handle the future.
No problem, Gideon thought. Wait until someone engineers you a new wife.
This sort of slippery slope would be fun to ride to the bottom.
If the man had cancer in his heart, would he have had the courage to get a mecha-heart put in? Or his lungs? Or his skin?
What about replacing a cancer-ridden brain?
Gideon loved the idea of extension, of improvement. Nobody should be happy with the pitiful arrangements of carbon nature gave them. Nobody should cling to them, or mourn their destruction.
He thought about Joyce and how she'd look with her breasts cut off.
She'd get used to it. She could keep her mammaries in a jar of formaldehyde and see how useless they were. Why did she want two misshapen bags of fat on her body? For that matter, why did she even want a body?
Bodies were the old way. Electronics were the first tentative step beyond, and already they outperformed Mother Nature in every single way.
He'd been eight when he'd first discovered the final, ultimate weakness of human flesh.
His parents had been made of flesh, and his parents had been annihilated so thoroughly in New York that not a fragment remained of either of them. Although they had a little funeral plot in the irradiated lands beyond, two Stars of David amidst a sea of crosses, there were no actual remains buried there.
They'd wanted him to come to New York, but he'd refused. He was always bucking them, and this time, it had saved his life. He'd seen them leave Philadelphia Synagogue, had waved them goodbye, and never saw them again.
He'd woken to the sound of sirens, and had seen the cloud from New York, looming across the landscape like a clenched fist. Martial law was now in effect in America.
He'd spent two months living in a canvas tent supplied by FEMA, one of thousands of new orphans. His ilk now blotted the land.
But he felt nothing at all.
At the end of the shuffling, the cards were dealt and the government gave guardianship to a fifty-year-old woman called Yolanda McKnight. She was one of the foster parents that the government declared as patriots, recipients of the newly minted Recovery Effort Medal.
She’d cared for him, but he’d also had to care for her.
Six years later, McKnight was arrested and charged with 1,332 counts of rape against minors, most of them on Gideon, another foster child she'd adopted, and a neighborhood boy. The exact number was known from explicit online chatlogs with a cybersex partner who had finally grown weary of the game and turned her in.
After the trial, strangers hugged him, told him that the nightmare was over, and that he'd been saved. He didn't understand. He felt nothing at all.
Yes, sometimes his hands shook, and sometimes he had weird blank-out episodes.
Sometimes he'd come to consciousness and find himself standing somewhere with no idea of where he was or what he'd been doing.
Sometimes he did awful things that he later regretted... and awful things that he did not regret, things that made him feel powerful.
Various other sex scandals among adoptive parents were in the news. McKnight was not the only one to take advantage of the Recovery Act and her sudden access to young children. For a time, he was shuttled around government run foster homes.
He’d also spent a year in the juvie justice system, but that was an aberration. He was getting better at controlling his behavior. And also better at not getting caught.
He was growing... but he wasn't sure into what.
He learned to be charming, to make jokes and be witty. When he tried, he was popular. But the mask kept slipping. He wasn't like the other kids. Didn't really want to be.
He viewed being a person as an act of sculpting, or painting. Yes, he could do it. When he applied himself, he could even do it well. But it was hard.
For Gideon, the act of being friendly took the same wrenching, all-consuming effort that Michelangelo used to furrow David's brow with a chisel. Making someone laughed seemed an artistic accomplishment equal to the Mona Lisa's insouciant, I'm-not-telling smile.
If manipulation was art, his masterwork was Tim Rubin, director of Operation Relaunch Foster Home. Gideon accomplished his magnum opus at sixteen years of age.
The problem: he had his sights set on the police academy, but he had some things on his record that would keep him out.
He was popular with the director, and he leveraged that popularity. Soon, he was helping the director around the house, babysitting his kids, mowing his lawn.
Soon, Rubin was being called out at weekly church services as a model foster kid, something that might have gotten him bullied if he'd been someone else.
Nobody bullied Gideon Heidelman.
He went on currying favor with Rubin for a year, always helpful, always gracious.
One day, they were alone, and Gideon found that the rumous about Tim Rubin were true.
“Gid, do you have a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Have you ever had a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Do you want a girlfriend?”
This line of questioning ended in five minutes with Gideon caressing the swelling bulge in Tim Rubin's pants.
Gideon had no sexual feelings, one way or another. But by now, he could fake anything.
He was about to pull down the director's zipper, when he dropped the question.
“Tim, before we do this, can I ask you a favor?”
Rubin's mouth was undone by lust. Affirmatives tumbled out.
“I want to join the Philadelphia Police Academy when I'm old enough, but I don't think they'll let me join.”
“Why not?”
Because his record had some blots.
Tim Rubin was shockingly easy to manipulate.
Yes, quite a few blots: arson, assault, under-aged drinking, animal cruelty.
“Should I be worried about these?” Tim Rubin asked, his finger already on the delete key.
“No, I didn't do any of that stuff. You know when you're running with a group of guys and they stick things on you? The cops wouldn't believe me.”
“Well, in that case... ” Gone, deleted, erased.
“There's one more thing. Can you access my psych records?”
Rubin brought them up.
DIAGNOSIS: BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER
“That's a mistake, too.”
The chains were gone.
Gideon was grateful to Tim Rubin, and he didn't feel grateful often. Without Tim’s interference, he would never have become a police officer, would never have been recruited by the government, and would never have had the chance to work for Project Elephant.
It was better than he could have dreamed.
He had a better set of eyes than God had given him.
He could see anywhere in the country. And he was twenty years and a few treaties away from being able to see anywhere in the world.
The machine repudiated his humanity. That is, if he'd ever been human to begin with.
Joyce gave him another case. A hard one this time, involving simultaneous cross-references of multiple data feeds.
He cracked it and sent it back fast enough to make her whistle in admiration.
More cases, one after another, coming at him like fast serves, low over the net. He fell into an effortless groove. Elephant Handling? This was easy. Being human was far more difficult.
It was as though, all along, he'd been part of the Project Elephant mainframe, and all that was necessary was for him to be plugged in.
When things started changing on the viewscreen, he reacted not with shock but with delight.
Bloody scenes.
Heads crushed to pulp beneath steel-spiked tire treads. Men torn limb from limb by wild animals.
He spent five minutes patrolling the streets of Santa Monica, seeing the hundreds of bodies nailed to telegraph poles, festooning them like impaled moths.
The inexplicable violent scenes wove together with his surveillance work, one seamlessly shifting to the other, until he was not sure whether he was looking at truth or fantasy.
Or whether he'd prefer them to be truth or fantasy.
“Here's another one. A fast turnaround is appreciated. It's from the DEA and they're big on time-dating.”
He opened what purported to be a major synthmeth bust, and was confronted with scenes from the pit of hell.
Using nail guns and flaps of loose skin, armed guards were taking emaciated prisoners and attaching them to one another.
Two men were made to lock lips, and then a nail gun made the kiss permanent. Blood and spittle commingled.
Two others were made to assume a crucifix pose, faces pressed together, before they were stapled through the wasted flesh that dangled beneath the triceps. They staggered away, rivulets of blood flowing downward like Christ's final passion.
Five men were motioned to come together in what resembled a football huddle. One refused, and a guard drew a pistol and put a bullet into him.
The remaining prisoners were joined with nails shot through whatever patch of skin on skin presented itself, until they were one, a staggering, shambolic entity with eight legs, eight arms, and four heads.
The guards looked on, in clear admiration of their handiwork.
One of them gestured, and they drew their guns.
Dozens of .44 rounds punched holes in the mound of quivering flesh. Blood sprayed. The clump of humanity seemed to shiver and quake as the bullets pounded home.
One of the guards removed his helmet.
Gideon only saw the face for a fraction of a second before the scene was gone. He now looked at a peaceful street in San Francisco.
He sat, feeling the need to undergo a momentary convalescence. He salivated.
Did the Vanadocams show the future?
Or did they show the present, the things that happened all around him, every day, things that his mortal eyes were too dull to perceive?
He solved the case. License plates screencapped. Perp identified. Done and done.
He felt as though the machine was solving his case, the thorn briar of mysteries nestled close to his heart. How could it be otherwise? It was an integral part of him, just like he was an integral part of it.
In a few minutes, the view-screen changed back again.
Animal vivisection.
Four-legged ungulates bleating and blatting, their mouths pushing out noises that he would never hear. Scientia, dominam mundi.
Surgical steel gleamed.
An enormous, drugged smile crept across Gideon's face.
* * *
Viktor woke and yawned.
He hadn't had any more nightmares, and that was a good thing. He did not have to operate the Vanadocam mainframe today, and that was also a good thing. He was now perfectly happy to think of it as an enemy.
He had the entire day off.
He loitered and dawdled. He did some more reading and actually finished one of the ebooks he'd bought the previous night.
The end had a call to arms on behalf of the One-Eyed King paramilitary group.
Electronic fund transfers accepted and welcome—tax deductible. Donations will be used for campaigning, promotion, and legal fees. Don't give tomorrow. Give today! Smash the invader in your home, atom from atom!
“In the Country of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is King” - Desiderius Erasmus
So this is all Kolde's way of scamming money from the paranoid, Viktor thought. How sad.
He phoned up his accountant and arranged a five thousand new dollar donation.
With little else to do, he went and had breakfast at the food court, watching sightseers come and go, and pondered the wisdom of that particular action. His wages from this tour of duty were held in an escrow account controlled by Project Elephant. He could access them, but things went in their records and ledger books.
It would be naive to think that they weren't paying attention to his withdrawals. A large donation to an extremist political group was probably not in his best interests. He'd just have to hope that five thousand wasn't big enough to get on their radar.
God, I hate it. All this subterfuge. I'm probably being watched more closely than anyone ever is by the Vanadocams.
With little else to do, he took a maglev into DC, and indulged a hobby he hadn't pursued in ten years. He found a baccarat table and played for six hours straight.
Leavenworth
Anzor heard the toll of the four o'clock bell and put down the utensils he was washing. He now had an hour of recreation. There were religious services, trade school courses, and a 3D hologram TV set to motivational programs you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy.
He decided to check his mail. Correspondence of a legal nature was delivered directly to his cell. For everything else, he had to ask. He went to the information desk and inquired if any letters had come in for his MDOC number.
At the start of his incarceration he'd received dozens of letters a week: hate mail calling him every foul name under the sun, letters of support (usually postmarked from organizations such as the Aryan Brotherhood, the Earth Liberation Front, and the KKK). He'd even had one or two marriage proposals from star-struck young female revolutionaries.
This time, the gray-haired woman glanced at a computer screen and shook her head without looking up. The world was forgetting him, as it had every right to.
He was about to go to the rec room, when a heavy hand thumped down on his shoulders. He turned around and saw a pair of men.
“Game's up, Khujadze,” one of the corrections officers said.
“What's going on?” A
nzor asked in a quiet, well-trained voice. Antagonizing a guard was easy. Sometimes, it was inevitable.
“When you came to Leavenworth, certain things were made clear to you. For example?”
Anzor hated guessing games. “Not to waste time in the showers?”
“That you were to keep your fuckin' mouth shut.” The other bull crossed his hands across his chest. “No fairy stories about what you think happened to you. No conspiracies. No exciting the other prisoners.”
“Are you saying that I—”
“Quiet, maggot. We asked you to do that one simple thing, and you haven't been doing it. When you rock the boat, it makes life hard for us, and that's a stupid move, because we can make life hard for you with compounding interest.”
Anzor didn't reply to that. He didn't know if the guys were jacking him around over nonsense or if he actually was in trouble.
He was leaning toward category B.
“That guy in the cell next to you? Lucas? He had a word with the head screw on duty and told us a few things about how you've been squealing to him about how you were set up. About how Project Elephant framed you. The very topic you had to avoid. You've stepped in it, Khujadze.”
“Why are you believing Lucas?” Anzor was filled with white-hot rage. “He only just got here.”
The bull waved the question away. “He showed us how you'd signed his fucking duffel bag. Is that how you see yourself, faggot? The prison celebrity? You want the commissary to do a limited run of Anzor Khujadze collectible cards? Well, isn't that something special.”
“Hey, he asked me to sign the goddamn bag. What else was I going to do?” Anzor's voice became shrill.
The guard's hand drifted close to the Taser clipped to his belt. “Don't argue with me. We're going to lay it on the line for you, Khujadze. You've fucked up. You received special privileges for a while, but they will now be taken away.”
“And that's just for openers,” the other guard said. “The warden's on the phone now. He wants to move you to another prison, one that takes a more broadminded view of corrections. His thoughts on the matter are that if you wanna rabble-rouse, you can do it in a place with cold showers.”
Anzor was shocked. “Don't believe this guy's bullshit. I hardly know him.”
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