Eternal Life Inc.

by James Burkard

  Her hips swayed with unconscious sensuality while the white silk gown displayed every wonderful curve and jiggle. Harry pursed his lips in a silent whistle of appreciation.

  “Mae, this is Harry,” Chueh said as the woman came up. “He’s one of my special customers.”

  Mae eyed Harry for a moment, her big, blue eyes smoldering with chained passion while a slight, ironic smile played across her lips as if she was secretly laughing at herself. “The famous Harry Neuman,” she said in a husky whisper. “I recognized you as soon as you came in.” She gave Harry her hand. “You’ve made my day, Harry,” she said with a little hiccup of laughter as Harry took her hand and raised it to his lips. The hand was soft, warm, and alive to the touch, and he gave a little start of surprise as he realized what she was. He kissed her hand gallantly and said, “The pleasure is all mine Miss…” he hesitated, uncertain.

  “West, Mae West,” she said. “Shaken not stirred,” she added, with a playful toss of her long blond hair.

  “Of course,” Harry murmured. “How stupid of me. You make an unforgettable impression.”

  “Excuse me, Mae,” Chueh broke in politely, “Harry and I have some unfinished business; then I want you to show him up to Doc’s suite. Maybe you can get yourself a drink in the meantime.”

  Mae gave Chueh a little pout of dissatisfaction, and then turned to Harry with a dazzling smile. “I’ll be looking forward to taking you upstairs, Harry,” she said with enough sub-vocal promise to make a sailor blush.

  Harry watched her walk back down the bar. Just before she stopped, she cast a look over her shoulder, just to let him know that she knew he was watching.

  Harry smiled and shook his head in appreciation. “This time you outdid yourself,” he said to Chueh.

  “How did you know?” Chueh asked, dropping any pretense to his laundry-man accent.

  “She’s perfect,” Harry said.

  “How did you know?” Chueh repeated

  “No one else would have even guessed,” Harry assured him.

  “How, Harry?” Chueh repeated patiently.

  “She’s alive, soft, and warm. She’s all woman, but there’s no ka.”

  “Ah!” Chueh sighed in acknowledgement. “Of course, you would know.”

  “For a while there she had me fooled. I really did think she was real. Then, I took her hand and I couldn’t feel her ka. She’s an eidolon, isn’t she?”

  Chueh nodded impassively. His face was like old, yellowed parchment that had been crumpled up and then smoothed out again, leaving a deep, webbed tracery of wrinkles.

  “I’ve never met an eidolon this lifelike before,” Harry said. “The movement is in perfect synch with the holographic image and the skin texture and feel of the repeller-field were perfect. I could feel the warmth and pressure of every finger. No one’s ever gotten an eidolon this lifelike before. How’d you do it?” he asked.

  Chueh shook his head. “She’s Doc’s baby, and even more special than you think. She could walk out of here with you and go anyplace you wanted to take her.”

  This knocked Harry back on his heels. An eidolon was only a hologram projection, clothing a repeller-field to give it solidity. A computer programmed with the personality matrix of the eidolon coordinated movement between the holographic projection and the repeller-field. All this hardware was bulky and external, projecting a solid image of limited range and quality. An eidolon shouldn’t be able to go any further than the equipment that supported it before the image atrophied.

  If what Chueh was saying was true, Harry could take Mae home with him or to the other side of the planet, and she would remain just as life-like. “How?” he asked.

  “Doc came up with the idea of putting the hologram projector and repeller-field inside the image instead of having to project it from twenty feet away.”

  “You lost me there. Where inside? How?”

  “Doc created a package about the size and shape of a slightly flattened football. It contains a miniaturized holo-projector, repeller-field generator, super-quantum-nano computer, sensor array, and zero-point energy pack, all wrapped in one of those little personal grav-units that baby’s wear when they learn to walk. The whole thing weighs less than a kilo and fits inside the chest cavity.”

  Harry shook his head in disbelief. “The computer power you would need to create and maintain such a lifelike repeller-field and synchronize it with a moving holo image is…is…” He couldn’t find words to cover this.

  “We could never have done it without the new super, nano-quantum computers and their near infinite capacity,” Chueh conceded. “They contain the latest AI programs coupled with a deep personality construct of the eidolon. It’s self-evolving and able to extrapolate new behavior-patterns within the constraints of the original personality.”

  “Like Marta,” Harry said, thinking about the nano-quantum computer and AI that Doc had installed in his car. “Only you’ve given her a human body.”

  Chueh nodded. “In a way Marta was the proto-type,” he said. “Doc thought she was so perfect that all he had to do was reprogram the personality substrates. Like Marta, all eidolons can and do make their own independent decisions governed by the hardwired failsafes encoded in the Robotic Laws that make it impossible for them to kill or injure a human being.”

  “That’s it!” Harry said excitedly. “You’ve created the perfect robot. No gears, wires, struts, or moving parts, just a football-shaped unit inside the hollow shell of a repeller-field. This has the potential to turn the world upside down! It’s as revolutionary as resurrection technology, maybe more so.”

  Harry looked around to make sure their privacy shield was intact. “How many other people know about this?” he asked.

  “Me, Doc, his research staff, and a few others who will not talk,” Chueh said.

  “That’s it?” Harry asked as the implications of this began to sink in.

  “Yes,” Chueh replied quietly, his eyes hooded.

  “I am honored by your trust,” Harry said and bowed deeply. He was also uncomfortably aware that he was in way over his head. Why would the most powerful Tong Godfather in the Empire trust someone like him with a secret like that? It didn’t make sense and that scared him.

  “Time to go now, Harry,” Chueh said. He broke the privacy shield and called Mae back. “Don’t keep Doc waiting any longer.”

  Harry hesitated.

  “Is there something else?” Chueh asked with mild reproach.

  Harry shrugged. What have I got to lose, he thought. I’m already in over my head.

  “I saw something strange at the entrance to your garden,” he said.

  Mae approached and Chueh waved her discretely back. The privacy screen closed around them again. Chueh cocked a questioning eyebrow at Harry, took a deep drag on his pipe, and waited.

  Harry told him about the Norma-gene he had seen levitating just outside the entrance to the garden. He kept his word to Susan and didn’t mention their meeting. Instead, he finessed the truth and said that it was the same Norma-gene who had approached him earlier, begging for money outside the Eternal Life building.

  When he finished, the old man nodded, his face expressionless. Then he fumbled in the pocket of his denim jacket and fished out a pair of old-fashioned horn-rimmed spectacles straight out of the nineteen-fifties. When he perched them on his nose, there was an almost instantaneous flicker as Chueh accessed his own private data-sphere. The spectacles flashed the results of his query directly onto his retinas, along with audio commentary. To an outside observer Chueh was just relaxing, smoking his opium pipe, his eyes hooded in peaceful contemplation.

  Harry looked around. Mae had gone back to the other end of the bar. The gamblers on the other side of the room were still at it. One of them in particular caught his attention. He was dressed like a cowboy and sat in the corner facing the bar. His wide-brimmed, white Stetson was pushed back on his head as he studied his cards. He was a big, raw-boned, handsome man, with a curl of black hair
falling over his forehead. It took Harry a moment to realize he was seeing another one of Chueh’s eidolons, this one the classic Hollywood cowboy hero, John Wayne. The other four men were just what they seemed, underworld heavy hitters waiting for their bosses to conclude their business upstairs.

  “Interesting,” Chueh mumbled at last and looked up.

  “And?” Harry asked, trying to hide his impatience.

  “And you were right,” he said. “Here, take a look.” Chueh looked directly into Harry’s eyes. The spectacles seemed to film over for a moment and then cleared, and suddenly Harry was looking at the street scene in front of the entrance to Chueh’s garden. He could see himself stop and look up a second after the Norma-gene appeared above the wall.

  “You’re certain that’s the same Norma-gene you met earlier?” Chueh asked after the scene replayed to the finish.

  Harry nodded. “Yeah, no doubt about it.”

  “Hmm,” Chueh said, chewing thoughtfully on the stem of his pipe. Finally, he looked up and asked. “What do you know about Norma-genes, Harry?”

  Harry shrugged. “As much as the next guy, I suppose,” he said.

  “You know who Rielly Logan is, don’t you?” Chueh asked with a hint of exasperation.

  “Sure, he’s supposed to be the new messiah of the Norma-genes.”

  “And?” Chueh prompted.

  “And about twenty years ago, he led ten thousand Norma-genes from Old Chicago across the Continental Quarantine to the promised land of Las Vegas. He set up his own country there, strictly for Norma-genes, and he’s pulled just about every Norma-gene out of New Hollywood and everyplace else with a promise of giving them a new healthy body, remaking them in the image of their dreams.”

  Harry stopped. Chueh gave him a disappointed, “is that all you got” look.

  Harry sighed. “From what I’ve heard, he can really do it.”

  Chueh waited, but Harry didn’t have anymore. Norma-genes and their new messiah were not on his top-ten hit list of things to know.

  Chueh frowned. “You should go and see Doc now,” he said. “Then come back and see me afterwards.” He broke the privacy shield and gestured to Mae.

  Harry bowed respectfully; and as he turned to go, Chueh added, “And Harry, you might want to keep up on the news better.”

  19

  An Eidolon’s Request

  Mae led him up the stairs and through the holographic image of the wooden balcony that, like so much at Chueh’s, wasn’t really there. Instead, they turned down a silent, softly lit corridor with silk carpeting on the floors and a hint of opium in the air. He wondered in passing if the smell was real or if Chueh had added it just for atmosphere. The walls on either side were rice paper and bamboo with sliding doors reminiscent of a Japanese teahouse or maybe a Chinese opium-den.

  Mae had been strangely silent on the way up. Now, she stopped in front of one of the doors and turned. “Here we are, Harry,” she said and gave him a bright, professional smile. It lasted all of two seconds before collapsing into a wounded little girl sob. There were suddenly tears in her eyes. “How did you know?” she asked. “Please, Harry,” she pleaded when she saw him hesitate. “I have to know what I did wrong.”

  Harry looked into those pleading tear-filled eyes and thought, but you’re only a computer programmed eidolon, a holographic image wrapped around a repeller-field. How can you be feeling this?

  “Please, Harry.”

  Harry wondered what Chueh would make of this and then thought, screw it. He took Mae gently in his arms and whispered in her ear, “You didn’t do anything wrong. You’re perfect. No one else would even suspect.”

  “But you knew,” she protested.

  “That’s because I’m…” he groped for the right word, “…different. You see, I can feel people’s ka, and you didn’t have one.”

  “That’s all?” she asked brightening up and smiling. “Then I didn’t do anything wrong? Oh, Harry, I’m so glad.” And she leaned over and kissed him on the lips.

  “Now, that definitely felt like the real thing,” he said, slightly flustered. “But can you tell me how you knew I knew?”

  Mae rolled her big, china blue eyes heavenward as if to say, isn’t it obvious, and then she sighed. “A girl just knows that kind of thing.” Then she patted him on the cheek, turned and sashayed down the hall.

  20

  So Many Questions, so Few Answers

  The sliding door, like the walls, seemed to be made of flimsy rice paper stretched over a delicate bamboo frame. In reality, these “flimsy rice paper” walls and doors were built of armored spider-spin on a titanium steel frame with reinforcing repeller-fields and were more solid than a bank vault. The Silver Slipper may have been impregnable, somewhere not on this earth, but Chueh believed in being thorough and always having backup.

  Inside, the rooms had state of the art privacy curtains that were guaranteed bug proof. Whether it was a delicate business meeting, a discreet lover’s tryst, or high political wheeling and dealing, Chueh’s always guaranteed complete privacy, discretion, and security.

  A mini grav-camera, hanging like a large pearl above the door, swooped down and looked Harry over. Then he heard the click of the latch being released. As the door slid aside, he realized that Doc wasn’t alone. A young woman sat across the table from him, studying an open electronic notebook.

  She didn’t look up when Harry came in. Her short, black hair was parted in the middle and fell like raven’s wings on either side of her bowed head, concealing her features. Harry quirked a questioning eyebrow at Doc.

  “Come on in!” The old man grinned. “Don’t just stand there gawking.”

  Chueh prided himself on offering his clientele a wide range of beautifully appointed rooms in all sizes and decors. To his eternal disgust, Doc and Harry made a habit of choosing late twentieth-century truck-stop. This came complete with worn, green linoleum floors, dirty beige walls, maroon-colored vinyl upholstered benches, and marbled green Formica-topped tables with little chrome record-selectors, containing the top jukebox hits from well over four hundred years ago.

  The plate glass window on the opposite side of the room usually looked out on a parking lot full of long-haulers, but today Doc had opted for something altogether different in the “dry landscape” of one of lost Japan’s most famous gardens, the Ryoanji near Kyoto. The fifteen stones scattered across a bed of raked, white gravel were starkly enigmatic and somehow deeply moving. The late afternoon sun cast long shadows across the gravel ridges and furrows, turning them into silent, standing waves.

  Harry wondered why Doc had chosen this particular scene. The contrast between the truck stop interior and the outside “landscape” was like one of those cryptic Zen koans, like “one hand clapping”, he thought, as he sat down beside Jericho.

  At that moment, the woman across the table closed the notebook and looked up at Harry with frank curiosity, and his heart skipped a beat.

  His first impression was of some exotic Botticelli Goddess, a Celtic Aphrodite maybe. Her skin was pale cream, her face a perfect oval. The nose was perhaps a little too long, but her eyes had an elfin tilt and were a startling jade green. She wore just a hint of ruby lipstick that accentuated the contrast between the cool cream of her skin and the jet black of her hair that fell straight and thick, cut in a curve to her chin.

  She was elegantly dressed in a cobalt blue silk blouse, open at the throat, black silk “coolie” trousers and black patent leather ankle boots. She wore a pair of silver earrings shaped like crescent moons. A fine silver chain and locket were just visible in the open V of the blouse.

  Harry stared spellbound. It had been years since the sight of a woman had moved him like this. In fact, not since Susan, he thought nonplussed and looked away, feeling strangely guilty and embarrassed.

  The woman tilted her head and smiled with a kind of sympathetic amusement as if she was used to having this effect on men.

  Harry glanced over at Doc. The old man tr
ied to keep a poker-face but was obviously enjoying Harry’s discomfiture. He cleared his throat theatrically and said, “Harry Neuman, may I present Miss. Diana Lloyd. She’s got an interesting story to tell. I think it might throw some light on what happened to you last night.”

  “Please just call me Diana,” she said with a slight, unidentifiable accent and offered him her hand.

  Harry felt an almost electric jolt as their fingers touched. Her grip was firm and cool with surprising strength in the long tapering fingers. A moment later, he felt her gently pull her hand away and realized that he had been just standing there holding it.

  He pulled his hand back in confusion and looked at Doc for help. He should have known better. The old man rolled his eyes like a lovesick Casanova, and Harry could hear him humming the wedding march under his breath.

  “Okay, Doc, cut it out.” He laughed and sat down next to the old man.

  “Cut what out?” Jericho asked with wide-eyed innocence.

  Harry turned to Diana and grinned. “You got to excuse him,” he said and put his finger to his temple and made little circular motions. “Old age, you know. It catches up with you after a while.”

  Diana smiled uncertainly and then put a hand to her mouth to stifle a laugh as Doc idiotically crossed his eyes and drooled his tongue out of the side of his mouth.

  “Don’t encourage him.” Harry laughed. “Or he’ll be hamming it up all day.”

  Doc straightened up and became as serious and dignified as a mortician at a mayor’s funeral. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child,” he intoned sonorously. “But now that I am a man…” He winked and pulled the cord of an imaginary steam whistle. “WO-O! WO-O!” he said.