Eternal Life Inc.

by James Burkard

“It’s personal.” Chueh shook his head. “Bad idea.”

  “It’s important, Chueh. It’s something I have to do.”

  Chueh gave him one of his inscrutable Oriental looks. Then he shrugged. “We’ll see,” he said. “If it takes too long, I’ll provide you with one of my own vehicles.”

  “But I need…” Harry started to protest.

  “Don’t push it, Harry.”

  Harry could hear the steel in Chueh’s voice and bowed his head respectfully. “As you wish, Master Chueh.”

  “I’ll keep in contact. We have other things to discuss,” Chueh said and then looked beyond Harry with an affectionate smile. “It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, Marta. I promise to call again tonight to hear how things are going.” Then he broke the connection.

  33

  Shutdown

  Harry sat in silence, watching a dark squall line of thunderheads climbing over the western horizon. Monsoon’s coming in early this year, he thought, absently tapping the steering wheel. Chueh’s decision irritated him, probably because he knew the old man was right. He couldn’t take Marta into old LA if there was the slightest chance that her systems had been compromised.

  On the other hand, he didn’t trust any other vehicle to cover his back if his premonition of danger proved true. Marta was the fastest, smartest, best-armed and armored car on the road today. Chueh probably had a few battle wagons that could match and probably surpass Marta’s armor and armament…but they weren’t Marta.

  “Harry, am I disturbing you?” Marta asked.

  “No, not at all. I was just thinking.”

  “You’re not mad at me for giving Master Chueh those coordinates are you? I know you didn’t say I could, but he was only trying to help and I…”

  All his resolve to talk to Marta about the distinction between his private information and hers crumbled when he heard the self-effacing uncertainty in her voice. This hacking had shaken her deeply. “It’s okay, Marta,” he said gently. “Don’t worry about it. You did good.”

  Chueh was right, Harry thought, as he swung the car around, following the new coordinates. There was no way he could take Marta into danger after what she’d been through. Even if Chueh’s “associates” gave her a clean bill of health, he might still have to take another vehicle. He knew Marta would hate it as much as he would, but he could always call on Chueh to back him up, and with Marta, Chueh’s word was up there close to God’s.

  The new coordinates took him in a wide bow, out over the sea, south of the city. They swung back in towards the southeast corner of the plateau, a landfill area of truck stop depots, warehouses and small fly-by-nights that catered to everything from horny truckers to wet-ware junkies.

  The setting sun sank into the squall line, rising over the sea. Harry could see distant flashes of lightning and hear the muffled rumble of thunder.

  Chueh’s coordinates took him down to almost ground level, threading a dark weed-choked maze between windowless warehouses. Harry turned on Marta’s headlights and throttled down. He could feel the powerful thrumming rumble of her spin-generators as they crept down a long narrow alley. The walls on either side were covered in a profusion of clinging vines. Their leaves slapped against the windows, and a bird flew squawking through the glare of the headlights. The alley made a sharp ninety-degree turn and Harry caught a glimpse of a mottled concrete wall through the greenery. For a moment, he felt like he was in the middle of some ancient, jungle-covered ruin. It didn’t feel as if anyone had been down here for centuries, which was probably just what Chueh’s associates wanted people to think.

  The alley dead-ended in a vine-covered wall. Marta gave it a quick, screeching squirt of hyper code and the wall slid slowly aside. They drove into a featureless room that was nothing but a large concrete box without doors or windows. As soon as the wall closed behind them, the floor dropped away, easing them down a long vertical shaft. They sank into a brightly-lit, cavernous space filled with roaring, grinding, banging activity and countless grav-cars in various degrees of dismemberment.

  A technician in spotless white coveralls waved them forward into another large elevator. When the steel doors hissed shut the elevator began its descent, a disembodied voice said, “Please make sure your roof repeller-field is in place. Decontamination begins in ten seconds. Mark!”

  Harry raised the repeller-field and a hazy blue bubble covered the interior of the car. A moment later the room was bathed in ultra violet light, and high pressure nozzles embedded in the walls, floors, and ceilings buffeted the car with hot streams of decontaminates. Afterwards, warm air blew the car dry. Steel doors opened in front of them and they slid into a spotlessly clean, white tiled room, lit with high-intensity lamps in the walls, floor, and ceiling. Halfway up one of the walls, the white ceramic tiles gave way to a glassed-in control room.

  Six white-suited technicians swarmed over the car as soon as it stopped. A couple went over the interior with portable detector scanners, while others popped the hoods fore and aft and crawled under the car attaching fiber optic and electric cables. One of the technicians motioned for Harry to climb out. “I have to go now,” he told Marta. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

  “It’s okay, Harry,” Marta said bravely. “Mr. Chueh explained that they’re going to have to shut me down for a little while, but there’s nothing to worry about. If there’s any hacking, they’ll find it. Mr. Chueh hires only the best.”

  As Harry climbed out of the car Marta called, “Harry, where will I go when they shut me down? I mean what happens to me? Do I just not exist anymore…like dying?” Marta was trying to keep up a brave front, but Harry could hear that she was afraid.

  “You don’t cease to exist,” he told her, gently rubbing her front fender where the density of her sensor arrays was greatest. “Your personality, everything that’s you, is just lying dormant in your memory core. This is like a human going to a hospital and being given an anesthetic. It knocks him unconscious for a while so the doctor can operate painlessly. The patient isn’t dead, he doesn’t cease to exist; his consciousness is just sleeping until it’s awakened. Don’t worry,” he patted her hood. “When they shut you down, you’re still here, and I’ll be here waiting for you when they bring you back on line.”

  “Thanks, Harry…” she hesitated. “I…I love you,” she said in a rush.

  Harry was deeply touched. “I love you to,” he said.

  “Harry please stay until they disconnect me,” she pleaded.

  “I’ll be right here,” Harry promised as the technician began going over him with a scanner looking for any electronic bugs that may have been fastened to his body. After he finished, the technician said, “Mr. Chueh wanted to see you when you were done.”

  “Tell him, I’m not done yet,” Harry said and turned away.

  The tech grabbed his arm. “He said right away.”

  Harry turned and deliberately stared at the hand on his arm. Then he looked up at the technician. He was a big, raw-boned man with a stiff shock of sun-bleached hair and pale, hard eyes. Probably one of Chueh’s leg-breakers in his spare time, Harry thought.

  They stared at each other for a moment. Then, Harry smiled disarmingly. “We don’t have to go there,” he said. “Just tell Mr. Chueh that Marta wants me to stay with her while they shut her down. I’m sure he’ll understand.”

  The technician gave Harry a measuring stare and then released his arm and spoke into a throat mike. After a few seconds, he nodded and gave Harry a tight professional smile that never quite made it to those pale blue eyes. “It’s okay, Mr. Neuman. Mr. Chueh will be expecting you when you’re finished.”

  Harry thanked him, but the technician remained standing beside him. “Don’t you have something to do?” Harry said. The tech just gave him his professional, zipped-up smile and remained standing there.

  “Ah, I see,” Harry said. “Another devoted, star-struck fan, dazzled by my glamour and enamored by my wit. You just can’t get enough of me, i
s that it?” Harry patted his arm in mock solicitude. “I understand. You’re not alone. Would you like my autograph?”

  The tech glared at him, and Harry could almost see visions of bodily harm dancing through his head.

  Harry turned away and stared up at the window wall of the control room where technicians sat over their electronic scanners and banks of computer monitors, studying readouts and making adjustments to equipment. “Can you put me in touch with whoever’s in charge in there?” he asked, squinting through the glare of the high intensity lights.

  When the tech, leg-breaker didn’t answer, Harry turned and looked at him. The tech tried to hold his eye in another tough-guy stare-down match, but Harry wasn’t in the mood for any more testosterone games. “Just do it, please,” he said wearily and turned away.

  He knew the tech was Chueh’s way of sending him a message, of showing his disappointment and displeasure with his behavior this afternoon. Well, message received, roger-wilco, ten-four, over and out! Now all he wanted was to get Marta through this as painlessly as possible, and he really didn’t need any more shit getting in the way.

  He could feel the tech standing undecided for a moment and then finally whispering into his throat mike. One of the white-coated technicians behind the glass wall looked up and his voice boomed out of a speaker high up. “Yes, what can I do for you?”

  “Could you give me a countdown of ten before you disconnect?” Harry asked.

  “Sure,” the tech nodded. “It’ll be a couple of minutes yet.”

  Harry walked back over to the car. He noticed how the cream color of the hood flickered nervously with that poisonous gasoline bruise running through it again. “How’re you doing, kid?” he asked brushing his hand lightly across her fender.

  “I’m fine, I guess,” her voice came through thin and reedy, a frightened little girl’s voice. Where was Janis Joplin when you needed her? “Maybe it w-won’t take so long. As the saying goes, ‘Absence makes the fart grow honder’.” She giggled nervously. “On a scale from one to ten that wasn’t bad,” she said.

  Harry smiled. “It could’ve been worse,” he agreed.

  “Real pun-ishment, huh?”

  Harry gave the requisite groan. He’d walked right into that one.

  “Harry, I’m sorry I let you down,” she said suddenly.

  “What are you talking about? Don’t be silly.”

  “You needed me tonight, and I let you down,” she said doggedly. “You were ambushed once before in the Sinks, and you never intended to let it happen again. I may not be very old but I’m not stupid. I know that’s why you armed and armored me, why you gave me all those military upgrades. And tonight you’re going back there, and I won’t be able to go with you.”

  Harry looked at his watch. “Don’t worry about it. We can still make it. We still got time.” He said it with more optimism than he felt. It was nearly eight. If he wanted to be out there and reconnoiter before twelve, he had to be going in an hour or so.

  “Don’t try to fool me,” she said. “I know what time it is as well as you.”

  The loudspeaker suddenly boomed, “Shutdown in ten, minus, mark…nine.”

  “You see, I knew what time it was.” Marta laughed nervously.

  “Seven”

  “Harry, please be careful!”

  “Five.”

  “I’m sorry I let you down.”

  “Three.”

  “Harry, I’m afraid.”

  “It’s okay, kid I’m right he…”

  “Shutdown.”

  The deep creamy gloss of color on the car turned the flat, dull gray of a photographic negative. Something vibrant and alive seemed to flee the heavy, dead machine hanging in the portable grav-units under the pitiless glare of spotlights. Harry knew that it was stupid and irrational, that Marta wasn’t gone, that she couldn’t be gone, that she was only a complex program floating in the bubble memory of a quantum computer, but still he felt as if he’d just seen someone die, someone he loved…his child.

  “Mr. Neuman.” Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He hadn’t realized that he was bent over with his hands splayed on the fender and his head resting on the hood of the car. The tap on the shoulder came again. “Time to go, sir.”

  Harry raised his head, slowly straightened up, and turned. It was the tech of course. His face was hard, set in concrete, expecting trouble, but when he saw Harry’s face, a bit of the concrete crumbled in confusion. “Ah, Mr. Chueh wants to speak to you now.”

  Harry was surprised to feel the wet trails of tears on his face. Where had they come from? He wondered and wiped them away.

  The tech shook his head in disbelief. “It’s only a car, for Christ’s sake,” he muttered under his breath as he led Harry out of the chamber.

  “Yeah,” Harry said. “Only a car.”

  34

  Smoke and Mirrors

  The tech slammed the heavy steel door behind him and left Harry standing in a dimly lit, windowless room, furnished with a battered metal table with a metal chair on either side. The table and chairs were an institutional gray and were all welded to the floor. Like an interrogation cell, Harry thought, which was probably pretty close to the truth. The room was sound-proofed. As soon as the door locked behind him, the silence was so complete he could almost hear dust motes banging against each other as they floated through the air.

  He sat down on the chair behind the table that the tech had pointed him to and waited. They were probably sweeping him for bugs again, making sure the room was secure before opening a line to Chueh. He looked around idly. The walls and ceiling were spinach green steel paneling. The light came from what had to be a twenty-watt bulb buried in a steel mesh cage bolted to the ceiling. He wondered why places like this always had to be so ugly. Then, he noticed the drain in the middle of the concrete floor and the dark stains that splattered the walls in places and decided that ugly was probably the best way to describe what usually went on here.

  He shivered involuntarily. The air felt cold and dank, with the musty smell of an old cellar. Beneath that musty smell he picked up something else, a putrid touch of decay mixed with the sharp tang of fresh blood. He noticed how the floor sloped down to that little open drain. Makes it easy to wash away the evidence, he thought. Well, maybe not all the evidence, he glanced at the stains on the wall. They seemed to have gotten fresher, glistening as if the walls were sweating blood.

  The smell of death grew stronger, a heavy, fetid smell of putrefying flesh. Harry felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. His heart began to race. He could feel the subsonic beat of terror constricting his chest. It stalked the edge of his mind like one of those black wolves looking for a way in.

  The steel door suddenly clanged open and Harry flinched. Then he sighed with relief when he saw it was only Chueh. He hadn’t realized how on edge he was. He started to get up.

  “Stay where you are!” Chueh ordered, his voice cold and hard. “If you move, I’ll kill you.”

  “What the hell is going on?” Harry said and then he saw the little fléchette derringer in Chueh’s hand. It was not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes but had six rotating barrels like a mini Gatling gun. Each barrel fired a little packet of miniature explosive fléchettes at well over Mach three. The six barrels could be discharged all at once with enough firepower to slice and dice an elephant at forty feet. On the other hand, one barrel would shred a man nicely at twenty.

  It didn’t have much range but was perfect for those more intimate occasions and was the weapon of choice for women against wife beaters, cheating husbands, or brutal pimps. It was equally effective against back alley gamblers with loaded dice and an attitude problem or barroom brawlers with axes to grind and a straight razor in their hands. The little guns were affectionately called “Daisies”, either because the six barrels looked like the head of a daisy or because that’s what you would be pushing up if you got on the wrong side of one. Like now, Harry thought.

  He looked up
at Chueh. “What’s going on…” he started and stopped when he saw Chueh’s face. It was not the friendly face of a laughing Buddha; how could he ever have fooled himself into believing that? This was the face of a murderous pirate, a ruthless Tong Godfather, and a sadistic psychopath with stone dead eyes. He felt as if he was seeing the real Chueh for the first time. The old man’s parchment wrinkled face seemed to telegraph every sadistic obscenity imaginable. Chueh’s lips crimped in a tight, humorless smile. “Good.” He nodded. “We understand each other.”

  He walked over and sat on the chair across from Harry. He wore an expensive, tailor-made, pearl gray silk suit with a diamond stickpin in a black silk tie and gleaming black wingtips on his feet. He crossed his legs and fastidiously straightened the crease in his trousers while he kept the derringer pointed in Harry’s general direction. With a fléchette derringer this close, “general direction” was good enough.

  The air was filled with the rank, sweaty smell of fear and death. For a moment, Harry couldn’t take his eyes off those six barrels of darkness spaced in a gleaming little circle. He felt raw, animal panic building. His body was throbbing with fear, drenched with sweat, redlining adrenaline overload. His mouth tasted of burnt copper. The room, cold and dank moments before, was now as stifling as a sauna. His breath came in short, hard pants as if he was trying to breathe through warm water. He couldn’t remember ever being this afraid. He would grovel, beg, do anything if only…

  Whoa! Wait just a minute! What the hell was going on? For a second, Harry caught a glimpse of the truth before his mind was swallowed by another wave of adrenaline fueled panic. But that one glimpse was enough. He fought his way back, like a drowning swimmer. His head broke the surface of illusion and, for a moment, the room flickered with images too quick to catch with the naked eye. Images charged with such emotional horror that…Once again, a tidal wave of fear swept over him with a roaring, subsonic throb of panic, but now he knew…he’d seen…He

  “SAY GOODBY TO KANSAS, DOROTHY”