Unkillable

by Dean C. Moore

  “Ravens are ridiculously intelligent,” Adrian said. “Some have been observed doing similar things for themselves, without training. If they’re determined enough, they’ll figure out how to pull the cork on a bottle to get at the treat inside. They have the largest brain of any bird. Their forebrains are on par with that of a chimpanzee and a human. They use breadcrumbs to lure fish, have been shown to construct and use tools effectively. Scientists have recorded them dropping really hard nuts on the street and waiting for them to be crushed by passing cars. They’re known to form crude cutting tools with stiff leaves and stalks of grass. They’ve been known to form cooperative relationships. They’ll alert coyotes and wolves to carcasses they’re unable to tear open to gain access to the interiors themselves. They can mimic the human voice like parrots. And the truth is we don’t know if they’re superior talkers or not because very few people keep them as pets the way they do parrots. Should I go on?”

  He turned to Celine and Klepsky to find them staring at him with alarmed faces. Both shook their heads in tandem. “Sorry,” Adrian said, “I’m just not in the mood to entertain thoughts of the supernatural this morning.”

  Adrian had noted some other talking points but figured he’d been pedantic enough for one morning. The ravens, unable to break the bones with their beaks, had instead dismantled the body at the joints. As to the skull, it had been cracked along the sagittal sutures, like looking for the most vulnerable parts to tap on an egg shell. With the bones stripped of flesh, they might well have been able to fly away with the bigger bones, even if they had to fly in tandem, two or more carrying the same piece.

  He turned to Celine. “You want to try some of those toys I saw you stuffing into your bag earlier?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” She acted as if she appreciated being coached. Doctors seldom needed to be cued to do things that came naturally, so she must really have been rattled.

  She set her shoulder bag down, zipped it open and yanked out a device. Flipped the switch on it and started passing it over the body.

  The underlying elements of the arms and head had been attached now. And the rest was coming together from smaller pieces after being lifted into place.

  A short while later, the birds were nearly finished. They were still affixing the ears and the eyes to the head and prying the mouth open to restitch the tongue.

  Klepsky snapped a shot of the face even before it was all together to run facial recognition on his cell phone. He didn’t need the eyes or the ears for that. So long as the facial bones and reconstruction were complete. They were. If he didn’t get a hit off of that, he could certainly wait for the extra details to be sculpted in later.

  “It’s Brent Thomas,” Klepsky said, bringing up more data on his phone. “CEO of GeneTech, a firm based right here in New York City. They’ve got cryogenic labs they oversee for paying customers, are involved with cutting-edge research in that area. They also own a number of patents in life-extending drugs. Some army contracts involve keeping soldiers alive long past when their wounds say they should be dead. And some more stuff my phone’s AI can’t get me access to just yet.”

  “How good is that AI, Klepsky?” Adrian asked.

  “It’s top of the line,” Celine interjected without turning away from her work. “I gave it to him. It’s DARPA grade. The tech isn’t supposed to exist for another five to ten years.”

  “That’s her polite way of saying the AI is smarter than you, Adrian.”

  Adrian made a “ha-ha” face without bothering with the actual “ha-ha.” “Why does Klepsky get to play with the fancy toys?”

  Celine continued to talk to them with the half of her mind not focused on the DB, though her eyes were entirely locked on her scanner and Brent Thomas. “I gotta protect my investment in you, Adrian. Something happens to you I have to start scratching my pussy in the middle of the night and start dreaming of my dildoe instead.”

  “I see your point.” Adrian nodded at her scanner. “That thing telling you anything meaningful yet? If not, allow me to get something else out of your bag for you.”

  “You’ve done enough fishing around in my dark places for one twenty-four hour period,” she said, eyes still attached to her scanner.

  “You can be a very crass woman when you want to be, you know that,” Adrian said. “It wouldn’t hurt you to filter your thoughts. Consider where we are, for Christ’s sake. You’re nothing like Dion, by the way. She knows how to be subtle. And she hardly ever says what she’s thinking. She’s a welcome break from you, if you must know.”

  Celine smiled one of those “you’re pulling up short on being annoying and long on being an ass” smiles. “I guess that means I’m a welcome break from her.”

  Adrian groaned. Thought about it. “Yeah, I guess you are.”

  “Maybe she’s playing you, you ever think of that?” Celine said. “She sounded pretty straight-forward to me on the phone, and she certainly didn’t pull back from my crudity. Maybe she just adopted that personality to carve out a competitive niche for herself distinguishable from all your other girlfriends.”

  Adrian pondered the point. “That might be something Monique might do. She’s the spy. They have to be able to blend in most anywhere.”

  He snorted, rested his fists on his lips for a little extra sense of confidence. “Dion pretending to be something she isn’t, huh?” he said, staring at the art work in progress. “I don’t know, maybe. She’s crazy enough. The shrinks are the craziest. And that’s saying a lot, since we’re talking about women. I’ll take it under advisement.”

  He realized he’d been chatting to help calm his nerves staring at the golem. No doubt Celine had similar reasons for putting words to the test. He was sweating in a room that couldn’t be more than fifty degrees. And Adrian didn’t sweat. Not ever. It was a genetic thing. He noticed Celine’s arm had gotten steadier with the wand she was passing over the golem as well during their verbal exchange.

  She kept bouncing her eyes back and forth between quasi-dead Brent Thomas and her scanner. “Damn it, Celine! Any time this century, and sometime before this guy pops his eyes open. I’m guessing his guard is going to be down when he opens his eyes and I want to be able to take the offensive fast.”

  She sighed and brought the scanner over to him so he could see for himself. “See these flashing lights? Those are his cells talking to one another. It’s called quantum signaling. I won’t bore you with the details, but it’s something cells can do without any involvement from the higher brain. Which is good, because that’s still not hooked up yet.” She tapped the screen and brought up another scanner app and another display. “What you’re looking at there are his spinal nerve segments reconnecting and starting to send signals up and down the spinal column. I have no explanation for how that’s happening other than it all trails back to the altered DNA that as far as I can tell is designed to make him unkillable.”

  “What’s going on here, Adrian?” Klepsky asked, dropping his hand with the phone, evidently frustrated with milking it for any more information.

  “I tell you what’s going on here. Brent Thomas was hired by the military to provide an unkillable man. He was able to deliver way ahead of schedule, not sure how. I’ll leave that for Celine and DARPA to puzzle out. It’s my guess that instead of delivering the completed nextgen prototype to the military, he’s been feeding them incremental improvements to keep the billions flowing in to his company’s coffers.

  “Meanwhile, he sells the earlier models that the US is a few generations ahead of to the Chinese, the Russians, anyone who’s got billions to cough up. He can keep stringing them along forever, until he’s amassed trillions, not billions, or until someone puts out a better prototype. By then he may have enough money to keep any new better prototype off the market because he’ll be able to afford to hire all the corporate spies he needs.”

  “And if someone gets wise to his ruse, decides to seek vengeance,” Klepsky said, “the bastard’s made sure the one person w
ith the truly unkillable body is him.”

  “That’d be my guess,” Adrian said, looking up at Brent Thomas. “I liked him better when he was lying dead on a bed with his throat slashed open. He looked shorter, less intimidating.” Nearly fully assembled, Brent Thomas was a good three inches taller than him, and more handsome—even in death.

  “So is this guy really going to reanimate or not?” Adrian said, targeting his question to Celine.

  “At the rate he’s going, I’d say, yeah. And you might want to pull your guns from now, assuming they’ll even slow him down. With regeneration processes like his, you should have brought more backup.” She glared at Klepsky. “Klepsky, don’t make me take back the fancy toys I gave you. I gave them to you so you could keep Adrian safe.”

  “Believe me, doc, Brent Thomas isn’t going anywhere.” Klepsky drew his gun in any case, and took a few well-advised steps back. “I’ve got the place surrounded. But they’re kind of here on a need-to-know basis. And they sure as hell didn’t need to know about this guy coming back from the dead. But worry not, I forwarded a picture of him already to my team so they know who to look for if he gets by us somehow.”

  Adrian could see the goosebumps forming on Klepsky’s body even from where he was standing. An armadillo had a smoother surface at this point.

  “So, if I follow you correctly, Adrian,” Klepsky said, “our killer wants to exert vigilante justice, and he wants to do it against people who’ve been holding out on the public trust, like our Brent Thomas here. He wants to create an age of equality and doesn’t much like the idea of rich people herding all the cool future-pointing tech for themselves. How am I doing so far, Adrian?”

  “I think you’re right as far as it goes, Klepsky,” Adrian said. “But you’re still not seeing the whole picture.”

  “You mean this private conversation the killer’s having just with you? Making sure all the kills conform to his profile of you, well, my profile of you, actually. Including the redacted section which says: huge fan of vigilante justice.”

  Adrian gave him a hard look. “Bravo, Klepsky. I honestly didn’t think you were that smart.”

  “I picked up a few things sticking close to you.” Klepsky’s hands were sweating so much and his grip so unsteady that he dropped the gun. “Shit!” he said, wiping his hands against his pants, and bending over to pick up the pistol. He didn’t just return to his police stance; he was rocking back and forth in it, switching the weight from his front leg to his back leg in a form of self-soothing.

  “But you’re not fooled that I am the killer? The mounting evidence is pointing to me.”

  “Let’s just say I’m suspending judgement.”

  “You mean you have me under twenty-four seven surveillance, there’s more guys around me than the president, and you just can’t see how I can get all this done without any of those guys figuring it out? Well, we agree I’m smarter than the average fox.”

  Klepsky smiled wolfishly. “And me thinking you’d chalk up my hesitation to bring you in to sappy sentiment and friendship and loyalty and…”

  “Shit!” Adrian took a big step back. So did Celine.

  The dead CEO’s eyes had just popped open.

  He was trying to say something. His mouth was moving but the sounds he was uttering were incomprehensible. “What’s he trying to say?” Klepsky said.

  Celine was back to playing with her scanner again. “Whatever it is, I wouldn’t be looking for anything worth etching in stone like the ten commandments. This man is ninety-nine percent brain dead. He’s a lot like those zombies the Haitian witch doctors are so good at procuring, actually.”

  “So, what, the guy shot himself up with his own miracle cure, only to realize too late that he didn’t have the formula all the way completed?” Klepsky said. “If it were me, I’d do some due diligence tests first.”

  “You mean if our other theory about there being a separate killer doesn’t pan out?” Adrian said.

  “Yeah,” Klepsky returned.

  “Unless I miss my guess,” Adrian said, “his breakthrough was provided by the killer himself. And it probably works as promised on mice and lesser order animals, maybe even on chimpanzees and apes. Well enough, at least, to pass any proof-of-concept tests. But when it comes to the two percent of our DNA that separates us from all other higher mammals on the planet, it just doesn’t deliver. Hence his vengeance.”

  Klepsky took a pull of air into his lungs that by all rights should have lifted him off the ground before he finally let it out along with the last of his pent-up tension, and holstered his gun. “I hate to say it, Adrian, being as I have a bit of a bromance going with you, but that noose is tightening around your neck.”

  “What makes you say that?” both Celine and Adrian said at the same time.

  “How many aptitudes does it take, you think, to create a breakthrough like this golem, right now as opposed to, I don’t know, say ten or twenty years from now? Only an army of well-funded specialists could have created this guy, in which case I doubt there’d just be one of them running around. On the other hand, a dilettante, a jack-of-all-trades kind of genius, could have done it. And they’re so damn rare these days. Hell, the only one I can think of, Adrian, is you.”

  “It’s a valid point, Klepsky.”

  “So you aren’t denying it?”

  “When have you ever known me to shy away from intelligent deductions?”

  “For the record, Klepsky, he volunteered himself as a suspect for the same reasons,” Celine said.

  “Yeah, before fucking your brains out. You’ll forgive me if I find you a bit biased on the subject.”

  “You know, you’re pretty damn crude yourself, Klepsky. Watch the language. Maybe you and Celine should be getting it on and leave me out of this.”

  Klepsky groaned. “You know this is tearing me up worse than it is you. I’d rather tear my own heart out than suspect you.” He stepped closer to the golem for the first time, admiring it now more like a statue at the park. Up until the verdict was in on him he’d refused even to put a foot onto the stairs leading up to the altar.

  “But a promotion is a promotion, I get it.”

  “There you go, being a smart-ass again.”

  “Go ahead and give her the rest, Klepsky. No need to hold anything back.”

  Klepsky looked over at Celine, made a strained face like he was trying to figure out how to tell his mother he was gay. “I’d rather you tell her, Adrian. She might take it better coming from you. She might think I just have an axe to grind otherwise.”

  Adrian smiled. “You really don’t know, do you? Your profiling needs work, Klepsky.”

  Klepsky shook his head. “I swear I’ve never seen a man more determined to frame himself for murder.”

  “You can tell me later, Adrian, in the privacy of our bed,” Celine said, confident that Klepsky was barking up the wrong tree, that, or she was just a better actor than she accused Dion of being.

  “Nah, may as well get it all out in the open.” Adrian cracked his knuckles as if he were decompressing, and using his words to out-gas before any more toxins got stored in his bones. “I took a sculpting class once. My favorite artist was this guy, Andre Vivan. He worked with unconventional materials that shouldn’t have held up. Not for days, far less for generations. He had to invent a whole new science to get his human figures to hold together better than the ones by Giacometti, etched out of bronze.”

  “That’s not particularly damning, Adrian,” Celine said. She’d exchanged the one scanner in her hand for another device in her bag.

  “Thin maybe,” Klepsky said. “But it sure does make for one more well-placed nail in his coffin. Go on, Adrian, now that Mr. Eternal here is starting to look a bit more like Mr. Anticlimactic.”

  Adrian refused to rise to the bait.

  “You sure there isn’t anything else you’d like to confess?” Klepsky said. “Ah, just between besties.”

  Adrian sighed. It felt like mock surrender,
but he couldn’t be sure. “I’m a frustrated writer of supernatural thrillers. I’ve been writing the e-books for years, and just can’t get them to sell.”

  Klepsky snorted. “God, that’s the best reason yet. Half the people I lock up any more are frustrated e-book authors. I’m guessing it’s a tough business.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “All that frustration builds and builds, it can do awful things to a man’s mind,” Klepsky said, sounding very empathetic on the subject.

  “That’s enough, you two,” Celine cut in. “And you, Klepsky, stop being such a sadist, feeding into his fears.”

  “You’re right. Sorry, Adrian. The wife’s not knocking me around anymore. Stopped breaking dishes and glassware over my head. Just giving me the silent treatment. She’s threatening to sic the lawyers on me. And I just can’t afford alimony or legal fees. So that just leaves taking out all my frustrations on you.”

  “No worries. What are friends for?” Adrian turned to Celine. “Well?”

  Celine just shook her head. “The reactions are reversing. This guy’s melting like a popsicle. At this rate, you’ll have to mop him up off the floor in another couple hours.”

  Adrian glanced up at the altar and noticed Brent Thomas’s insides were already oozing out his feet. He looked more like a candle melting in the wind to him than an icicle melting. But who was he to argue over analogies? “I suppose that’s how this guy’s standing to begin with? If not rigor, some kind of cryopreservative?”

  “Yep,” Celine confirmed. “To get these many chemical reactions to take place at these temperatures is a minor miracle in itself worthy of its own line of studies.”

  “I think you’ll find that extracts made from certain frogs that freeze over the winter and then return to life during the spring thaws will provide you all the missing pieces you need to solve that mystery,” Adrian explained.

  “God damn it, Adrian! Stop talking,” both she and Klepsky said at the same time.

  “You managed more genuine remorse that time, Klepsky,” Adrian carped. “Good for you.”