Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief

by Alexander Jablokov

  “I didn’t want you to be useful to me,” he said. “I really didn’t.”

  “Any reason why? I might surprise you with the things I can do.”

  “We first overvalue the things that are useful to us, and then undervalue them. I didn’t want that.”

  “That’s so sweet.”

  She was so deadpan he couldn’t figure out if she was making fun of him, or appreciating his thought, or first one and then the other.

  She shot out of the shopping center parking lot and merged into the surprisingly heavy traffic heading east.

  Maura ate while she drove toward Spillvagen’s. Her dark eyes reflected the oncoming headlights. He sensed her annoyance when a larger piece of lettuce pulled out of the sandwich onto her lower lip. She flicked it up with a sharp fingernail and caught it in her mouth.

  “Potato chips.”

  He was starving. But having asked for this, he wasn’t going to ask for anything more. He knew she would have gladly given him any of it. But she might feel hungry later in her shift, and he didn’t want her thinking about him at that moment. Men were supposed to bring women food, not take it from them. He held the bag open and let her grab handfuls as she drove.

  “You have much to do, at this hour?” he said.

  “We usually get a late-night crowd, people who need to print their explanation of the universe before the sun comes up and need the neon yellow copy paper so that someone will take them seriously, or who’ve decided that this is the night they’re finally going to get organized, so that they can stop wasting their lives. Most people have n moment or two where it seems that the solution to their problems is hanging folders and a label printer.”

  “I’ve made a couple of late-night runs to places like yours myself, in my day.”

  She didn’t say anything. Conventionally, phrases like “why doesn’t that surprise me?” seemed so expected that their absence was disorienting.

  “There’s a granola bar.” She put the back of her hand against his. “You can have half. It’s blueberry brown sugar jungle nut, or something. They’re all pretty much the same.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Take it, come on.”

  He tugged the wrapper open along the seam. He felt the pressure of her fingernails as he put it into her hand, and wanted to just go somewhere else and forget Hesketh, everything. There were other things that were more important.

  But Maura had to get back after her break. No sense in getting her in trouble at work. That was important too. He ate his half of the bar in two bites, then folded the packet and put it back in the bag, just as neatly as he knew she would have.

  “Just up here.” He pointed, and she pulled up to the curb, on the opposite side of the block from Spillvagen’s house.

  They sat and stared at each other for a few seconds.

  “Bernal?”

  “Yes?” This was her cue to tell him to be careful.

  “Please wait until you’re done before you call me again. Seriously. I don’t want to be with someone who’s always worried about the fate of humanity or something. Makes me feel like I’m in second place.”

  “You’re not in second place, Maura.”

  She tugged lightly at his sleeve. “I think I know that. But now, go.”

  He struggled with the shoulder harness for a moment, then got out. She raised her hand and waggled her fingers as she drove away, but did not glance back at him.

  45

  “Shhh!” someone said.

  Bernal looked down. Clay, Spillvagen’s young son, crouched behind the pickup truck parked in the driveway.

  Bernal crouched down next to him. “What’s going on?”

  “Dad’s going to the Moon!”

  The windows of Spillvagen’s garage office glowed with light.

  “Is he?”

  “Yes! He’s got the spaceship. I mean, he’s going to get the spaceship. It’s hidden somewhere. He has to find it.”

  “It’s worse than that, Clay,” Honor’s voice said from somewhere above them. “Much worse.”

  She sat cross-legged on the pickup’s hood, erect and solemn.

  If these kids had been actual dangerous people, Bernal would have been in deep trouble. He hadn’t even seen them sitting out here in the dark. No wonder Charis didn’t want him along on any important operations.

  “What do you think he’s doing?” Bernal said.

  “Something crazy, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to tell you anything about it.” Honor was tart.

  “It’s important. I need to know.”

  “Does he really think I need my adolescence to be interesting? Like providing an eccentric dad figure is some kind of benefit to my development?”

  “The world is short of interesting people,” Bernal said. “Feel glad that you know at least one.”

  She sighed in exasperation. “My friend Susan wants to be a writer when she grows up. I don’t know why. Does she think people are still going to be reading things when we’re adults? Whatever. But her parents are super normal. I don’t want to be a writer.”

  “A pity,” Bernal said. “What do you want to be?”

  “Someone who lives somewhere else.”

  Something clanked in the garage. It sounded large and metal.

  “Can I go in?” Bernal said.

  “No!” Clay said in agony. “He said—”

  “Go ahead,” Honor said. “He needs help. I’ve been hearing him bumping stuff and swearing for the past hour. Mom won’t help him. Says he’s crazy. Dad shouldn’t try to use his children as some kind of human shields, anyway. Susan would like that aspect of it. Betrayal is an important part of any writer’s development, she says. Her parents come to her class presentations, even when it’s about, like, agricultural products of Central America. When she’s done they even do that ‘rock on’ thing with their hands that older people like so much.” She stuck out her pinkie, forefinger, and thumb and spread them wide, then looked down as if the hand was being shown to her by someone else. “I guess that is kind of embarrassing. Maybe that will be enough to get her there.”

  “Where is your mother, anyway?”

  “In the basement, watching TV. That’s not so interesting, is it? Let Susan make that interesting.”

  “Why don’t you go watch with her?”

  “Not appropriate for children,” Clay said, very serious.

  “She watches a lot of shows about teenagers having sex,” Honor said.

  “It’s true.” Clay hid his face in embarrassment. “It’s true. You can tell by the music.”

  Honor slid off the hood. “Think of the burden that places on my generation. Come on, Clay. You want to play Yahtzee?”

  “Jenga. I want to play Jenga!” Forgetting entirely about his father and his mission, Clay hurtled through the house’s side door, leaving it hanging open.

  “When you talk to my father . . .” Honor pulled herself to stern attention. “Tell him we fell where we stood.”

  _______

  “You bastard!” The sight of Spillvagen in the “implicitly trustworthy” checked polyester short-sleeved dress shirt and a tie showing saguaro cactuses with Mexicans leaning against them and sleeping under their huge sombreros, enraged Bernal. “They tried to kill me.”

  Spillvagen sent something skittering away on the concrete when he jumped. “You—the wrench! Did you see where it went?”

  “Never mind the wrench!”

  “Without it, this thing won’t work. You don’t want that, do you?”

  “I think it went over there.” Bernal pointed but did not move.

  “Could you help me? I don’t have a lot of time.”

  “I don’t know what it looks like.” Bernal crossed his arms.

  “Oh, for heaven’s . . Spillvagen dug frantically under the pile of furniture created when he had cleared the garage floor for his new possession. The chair at the very top tilted perilously, and Bernal watched with interest as it wobbled. “You don’t know how
important this is.”

  The thing on the makeshift frame of cinder blocks and metal pipe was a garage product, all ropy welds and pop rivets. This had to be the thing hidden under the tarp in the Ziggy Sigma van. Its compressor, flaring cooling fins, whirred quietly. It snaked a power cable to a clunky propane-powered generator, which added its own hum.

  He could see the original field device Spillvagen had once described to him, one intended to cool down bodies and heads quickly, readying them for cryogenic preservation under emergency circumstances. Hanging off it was a large insulated blob. It clung to the compressor, looking like a swollen peapod.

  That was where Muriel’s head had been kept, in between her beheading and her incorporation into Hesketh. It looked like there was room for more than one head in there.

  This was what he had seen Spillvagen haul into here the other night, before he and Yolanda tussled in the tree-house. Bernal wondered if she was up there now.

  “There,” Spillvagen said. “Jesus, it’s filthy under here. Melissa’s right. I got to clean up more.”

  “Do you know what this thing has been used for?” Bernal said.

  Spillvagen stood up. Something glinted silver in his hand. “Of course I do.”

  Bernal suddenly realized that he was alone with a man who was desperate to recover three frozen heads. The question was: how desperate?

  He turned slowly.

  But Spillvagen stumbled past him and sank into his desk chair. He looked like hell. He had graying stubble on his plump cheeks, and his overgrown eyebrows begged for a trim. Spillvagen scratched his head with the box wrench he held in his hand, leaving thinning hair standing. “Bernal. I need help.” He finally seemed to think about what Bernal had said. “Who tried to kill you?”

  “Who else? Your two recovery agents, Prelate and Vervain. The women you hired to find this thing for you.”

  “What did they do to you?” Spillvagen seemed idly curious.

  “They threw me in a car, drove out to the woods.” Spillvagen shook his head. “They were going to bring you here.”

  “Here? Why?”

  “Because I need your help.”

  “To do what?”

  “Well, my official job tonight is to get the head of Muriel Inglis out of the cryogenic freezer where she’s stored. That’s what I’ve been hired to do.”

  “By who?”

  “By something. Someone. I don’t know. I’ve been negotiating. Whoever it is knows that I’m the only one around with the skill and knowledge to get this head out without blowing some gasket or raising the temperature too high. They can’t mess around, because they have three other heads that have to be kept at operational temperature.”

  “Hesketh,” Bernal breathed.

  “Call it what you want. Getting your buddy Muriel out wouldn’t be that big a deal. Sounds like a pretty straightforward job.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “I want all my heads back. Not just that one, which isn’t even one of mine. All three heads stolen from Long Voyage. I suspect there will be problems with that.”

  “And you want me to help you.”

  “Well, yes. I didn’t know who else I could turn to.”

  “When are you planning on making the attempt?”

  “Tonight.”

  ______

  Spillvagen tried to control his excitement as he drove. “Sounds like that personality boosting thing works better than I ever thought.”

  “Maybe.”

  “It’s going to be industry standard for cryonic suspension! I mean, that’s always been the fear, deep down, that you’d wake up with a functional neural system but no personality to go with it, just balls rolling around on the floor with the juggler gone. Now we can guarantee identity survival. That’s a real value add.”

  “Muriel isn’t just a business opportunity for you, Norbert. She needs help.”

  “And I’m helping her, aren’t I? If it wasn’t for you, I’d have had her out—” He hit a bump on the road and craned his head out the pickup’s back window, trying to see the bed of his pickup. “Hey, is that thing okay back there? It’s pretty hacked together. One of those seams gives, liquid nitrogen will shoot out and you’ll see quite a show.”

  “It’s fine.” They had worked carefully strapping the head storage device down and padding it with chunks of styrofoam from an old stereo. “What do you mean, you’d have had Muriel out already?”

  They drove past farms and woods, far out from Cheriton. If you were sufficiently far from a highway exit, the wrinkled geography of central Massachusetts could still feel miles away from anything. Good thing, Bernal thought, he wasn’t riding out here with a serial killer who wanted to freeze his head.

  He glanced over at Spillvagen, who, hands at ten and two, drove like a determined old lady. Good thing.

  “That night at Near Earth Orbit, when you decided to pick a fight with Ignacio. That’s why I was there. I’d gotten a message. I have an anonymous message board where clients can leave information for me without being identified, though I usually know who they are. I didn’t know who this was, but whoever it was knew a lot about me. About Long Voyage and Yolanda. Offered a deal. If I got that head out, I would have information that would get Yolanda off my back. Evidence that her precious uncle was undisturbed, unaffected, still sleeping the frozen sleep of the just. His head wasn’t gone, just mislaid, during all the messing around during Ungaro’s violation of our security. I could have had your precious Muriel out that night, in a quick-storage device, not a lot of support, but enough to preserve it.”

  That fit with what Bernal had seen that night and concluded later. Hesketh had busted out of Charis’s yard and gotten Ignacio to pick it up. The Enigmatic Ascent crew had also gotten a pickup message, probably from Muriel, but had gotten there too late. Ignacio had headed to Near Earth Orbit to get Spillvagen to do a little quick surgery and remove the indigestible lump of Muriel’s personality. But the volatile Ignacio had picked a fight with Patricia and scared off Spillvagen.

  So Hesketh, and Muriel, had been right there that night, probably in the back of Ignacio’s SUV, and Bernal had never known.

  “It was lying to me,” Spillvagen said. “It wasn’t giving up Uncle Solly.”

  “You didn’t question where this extra head had come from or anything?”

  “I’d have figured it out. Bernal, have you ever been involved with lawyers? You get involved with lawyers, you come back and tell me I should have asked more questions when someone offered me a way out. They stick a proboscis behind your eyeball and suck your brain out. There is nothing, nothing worse.”

  “Okay, okay,” Bernal said. “But now you’re after bigger game.”

  “You got it. Why take one head, when you can get them all?” Spillvagen jerked a thumb back at the head-taker. “And I now have the capability for taking care of them all. Everything back the way it started, and no worries. Frozen heads back in their dewars. I can just get on with my life.”

  Bernal thought about that. “Hesketh isn’t crazy. Well, anyway, not crazy like that. Why would it leave itself defenseless, let you open it right up like that?”

  “If Muriel really is disrupting its operations, then it has to get rid of her. Like someone pulling a rotting tooth with a pair of rusty pliers and nothing but a shot of gin as anesthetic. It really doesn’t have a choice.”

  “Because it killed Ignacio,” Bernal realized. “Dropped a transaxle on his head. It doesn’t have assistance from its acolyte anymore.”

  That seemed odd now. If Hesketh was desperate to get rid of Muriel’s head, why hadn’t it waited to succeed at doing that before getting rid of Ignacio? It had left itself open to Spillvagen.

  “After Ignacio got killed, I thought about how the Bowler and Hesketh might have gotten together.” Spillvagen turned off the dark road onto a narrower and rougher one. Once they were past an old chicken coop, the woods closed in. “I thought about the kind of person who would serve as an accom
plice to a homicidal artificial intelligence made out of human heads. Specific personality type, I’d think. Someone as out on the edge as it was. So I kind of looked around, trying to figure out how such a person might have gotten in contact with Hesketh. Now, people online are always making weird connections with each other. One has a boat, the other floats it.”

  Bernal thought about Ignacio. A sullen, violent man, with a talent for moving complex and illegal gear through various channels, and with a steady supply of parts. Someone with contact with Hess Tech and who seemed to know the story of Long Voyage. It made sense that Hesketh would have sought out someone like him.

  “So I checked out the criteria. I shook the data, got a bunch of people who fit. Two came up most often: Ronald Borden, in Klamath Falls, Oregon, and Geoffrey Gregg, in Russellville, Kentucky. Both had been obsessed with beheading animals as kids, and both had an interest in mechanical devices. That was something I figured Hesketh had been looking for when it was recruiting, so I threw it in the mix. Two years ago, Ronald Borden was in an inpatient psych unit in Medford, Oregon, heavily medicated. He hadn’t committed an actual crime, but he’d built some strange gizmo out of used car parts that could easily have killed his mother, a prostitute, who decided for unrelated reasons not to come home that night. No one was sure if the thing would have worked, or even exactly what it would have done. Geoffrey Gregg was under observation after having made threats to a young girl in his neighborhood.

  “Around that time, two years ago or so, both Borden and Gregg reported getting communications from someone. A rich uncle that was going to get them out and put them into a special room, a government agency that had a specific need for their special skills, a sinister yet NASDAQ-listed organization with an open position. In both cases, the staff saw this as evidence of delusion. Anyway, Borden got his meds changed. Two days later, he escaped from the facility. He was found five days later in central South Dakota, almost frozen to death in a ditch. He was wearing only a light jacket, and it was early December. He had been hitchhiking. Where was he going? He refused to say, but he was on 1-90, heading east. Us locals know that as the Massachusetts Turnpike.”