Unkillable

by Dean C. Moore

  Dion’s apartment faced the marina. It was foggy outside at night, and so the boats were sounding their horns. It had become a bit of a contest to see if Adrian could get her to moan louder than the boats outside. His cunnilingus technique aside, he’d been giving Dion oral gratification long enough for her to catch on to the game. She was laughing in between her moaning. And then her latest orgasm eclipsed the loudest of the horns outside just when the ships seemed to be competing with one another for attention.

  Adrian finally rolled over on his back. He’d been going at it for over an hour. Long enough to get a stiff neck and to no longer be able to coordinate his tongue fully. Sounding like a drunk with cleft palate, he said, “I just couldn’t ge’ my dick to work af’er the all-nighter with Celine. It was that or han myself and dangle I’ front o’ yaw window in sham. Knowing you, you’d jus ge’ out a sketch pad and star drawing to ge’ in touch with your right brain bedder so the drawing could reveal to you what the actual han’ing couldn’t.”

  She laughed. “Without question.”

  After a time, a shrill rat-tat-tat of brass on brass raped the soft silence they shared.

  “Your phone is ringing,” he said.

  “You’re the only one on the planet any more with a phone that actually sounds like a phone should, Adrian. That’s not my cell, that’s yours. Mine plays Wagner.”

  “The scene where Luke Skywalker blows up the death star?”

  “Of course. In the same way, I use my laser focus to sever the hold the past has on my patients.”

  Adrian sat up in bed. “Touché. If I had a past, I certainly can’t remember it. Not from this narcotic state you keep me in.”

  His weak smile caved readily to the next ringing of the cell phone. The ensuing frown was hardening like cement when he realized he’d changed his ringtone from seagulls squalling—which had lost its capacity to charm in lieu of recent events—back to a 1970s ring tone.

  He reached over, picked up the phone on the bedside table, and flipped it open. The instant he put it to his ear, he heard, “Adrian, this is The Golem Guy. I want you to know it took me a while to get used to that moniker. But oh, the slings and arrows we take in the name of love, huh?”

  Adrian turned to Dion lying in bed with the satin sheets drawn up just enough to qualify her for the cover of a Harlequin romance. “Yes, indeed.”

  He turned back around, padded over to the window, and lowered his voice. “What’s this about G.G?”

  “I’m afraid you’re still not seeing the bigger picture, Adrian. So I’m going to have to step things up. I’m sorry, but love hurts.”

  Golem Guy killed the connection.

  ***

  “What is it, Adrian?” Dion asked from bed after Adrian had hung up his cell phone and refused to turn around, continuing to stare at the marina steeped in fog.

  He didn’t answer.

  “G.G.” She rolled the initials over her tongue to get the blood pumping to her brain again, and away from her crotch. “Golem Guy. Shit!” She sat up in bed and pulled the sheets towards her, and it wasn’t out of modesty.

  “What did he say?”

  Again, no response.

  If she didn’t know better, she’d say he’d transformed into a pillar of salt looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah after he’d been told not to. Maybe she did know better. “You were told to awaken instead of sleepwalking your way through life. You failed to do so. And now he’s making you pay?”

  Adrian finally turned towards her. “I hate how you do that. Use my head as if it were some damn crystal ball. No one likes to be that transparent.”

  He fell into the chair she kept at her vanity against the wall, buried his face in his hands. “I can’t believe you still won’t tell me what it is I’m supposed to be seeing that he wants me to see.”

  She let the ensuing silence buffet what she had to say next. “You know I can’t, Adrian. It’s not how the game’s played. However he’s making you pay now, it’d be worse if I intervened. Take it from someone who has been working with aberrant personalities all my life.”

  “Aberrant personalities.” He snorted. “That a polite euphemism for psychos? I suppose you said that because you suspect he’s watching. If the FBI has me under twenty-four-seven audio-visual surveillance, it’s a safe bet someone can hack their way past their best cybersecurity guys. And it’s not like you to make a single false move, is it, Dion?”

  She let him have that dig. He was just lashing out in anger rather than facing the fear. And she just happened to be there. She knew it really didn’t have anything to do with her. Besides, he was right.

  She let the silence in the room put a Band-Aid on both their wounded psyches. So many uses for silence in her profession. So few for words.

  From the look in his eyes, she could tell he was punishing himself for not being all-knowing. Not exactly an original look on him. And she’d chided him enough for it before. Saying as much now would likely just make things worse.

  Once he’d flagellated himself enough psychically, the grief would give way to anger, and anger to vengeance. And that would get him moving again. Sometimes there was no avoiding hiking through the quicksand pits we create for ourselves with our lives.

  ACT THREE

  CONSEQUENCES

  FOURTEEN

  “You coming back to the office, sir?”

  That was Ed’s voice on the other end of the cell phone. Klepsky wondered briefly why Ed wasn’t talking to him through the car’s speakers as he usually did. But judging by the emotional neediness in Ed’s voice, he’d say if Klepsky couldn’t hold him right now, at least he could hold the phone with a likeness of Ed. Ed wasn’t kidding about being able to relate to the twenty-one-year-old former child prodigy David Clancy. Though, Klepsky suspected, in Ed’s case, the emotional neediness derived from something else altogether. Maybe just a lack of romantic love more so than a lack of parental love.

  “I’m chasing down that third lead Adrian gave us, regarding the AI.”

  “But, sir, after that call from Golem Guy to Adrian, I thought our time would be better spent in a room with Adrian brainstorming what the hell it is we’ve all been missing.”

  “I’m too methodical and stuck in my ways to be of much use in any brainstorming session. Free-association isn’t my thing, Ed. But by all means, if you can get Adrian to agree, go for it. I’m sure you and the rest of the team would be invaluable there, as you have been with the rest of the investigation so far.” His techies were all like kids on some level. After the beat down of the killer’s call, they’d all be taking it pretty rough, not just Adrian. So it was time to prop them up a little bit. In truth he wanted to strangle them. There wasn’t one of those junior futurists working on the team that didn’t have at least fifty IQ points on him. And all they were good for right now, as far as he was concerned, was target practice.

  “Brief me on this AI guy,” Klepsky said, deliberately lowering his voice and adding a little sultriness to it. If he couldn’t outsmart them, he could certainly outplay them.

  “Yes, sir,” Ed said, sounding perkier already. “Love the pillow-talk voice by the way. Can you just see us just sharing seminal insights on a case in bed after being, you know, all seminal?”

  “Ed.”

  “Sorry, sir. Ah-hem, let’s see, just power blasting through that wall of resistance right now to get to my photographic memory with some deep breathing, sir.”

  Klepsky listened idly to Ed’s power breaths. He hated to say it but the unintentionally funny ones like Ed got him to crack a smile a lot faster than the sharp-witted whip-cracking humor ones he was all-too used to at the office. Typically, gallows humor was served up with morning coffee as the more powerful of the two eye-openers.

  Ed must have made contact with his photographic memory finally. “Biyu, female, thirty-three, Chinese dissident, current expatriate living in New York City, name means ‘Jasper, the precious stone.’”

  “It didn’t strike you as funny
that all our suspects are within New York City proper, Ed?”

  “Ah-hem, well, initially, sir, but it is Manhattan, and we do kind of have more psychos per square inch around here than…”

  “It’s lazy thinking, Ed. We’re the FBI, our suspects are supposed to come from all over. That’s why we have a jet on standby and Adrian’s harem of women is prepared to follow him everywhere on a dime.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah. Dion’s private practice commands so much respect and top drawer customers that they have no problem taking their sessions with her most anywhere in the continental U.S., or across the globe, for that matter. As to Celine, she works for us, as part of a joint DARPA and FBI arrangement, so she goes where we go. Monique…”

  “That’s the spy with a thousand faces, fluent in a score of languages, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s her. She already operates on an international level, comes with her own private jet.”

  “And the ninja assassin chick, Veronica? I guess it goes without saying she works on an international level too. He sure knows how to pick his girlfriends.”

  “Now, Ed, I ask you again. Why is it for a team of people who are prepared to go anywhere on a dime depending on where the action is all suddenly, claustrophobically confined to Manhattan?”

  “It’s a point, sir. I’ll get on it. It’s possible our bad guy lives outside of New York City, so focusing our attention on Manhattan was just a way of buying him time.”

  Klepsky glanced at the Statue of Liberty out his window as the car passed it on the right. He was caught up in traffic briefly, forced to take a long hard look at it. The words associated with her ran through his mind. Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! He snorted. These days it was more like, Give us your budding bioterrorists, computer hackers, NASA nerds and rocket engineers, Your lowly atomic physicists, geneticists, neuroscientists, And with these and every mad scientist you can lay your hands on, we’ll build you a new world, Even if we have to blow up the old one. He sighed. “Ed, give me the rest on Biyu.”

  “She could easily be girlfriend number five for Adrian, assuming there’s enough Viagra in all the world.”

  “So she’s hot, energetic, and at the top of her field? Are there any other kind of suspects anymore, at least for our department?”

  “Honestly, sir, we’re lucky to have her. Without these Chinese dissidents our robotics and AI programs would be decades behind the Chinese. Turns out a ruthless totalitarian regime that has no problem replacing its people with high-functioning robots is way better at making progress in this field than we are.”

  “If so, I’m sure we can make her jail cell quite accommodating, with all the latest lab tech she needs. Now get on with the briefing, Ed.”

  “There’s really not much else, sir, unless you want me to go breaking down corporate firewalls, the kinds of which are going to cause huge pushback for us.”

  “The Futurist Division of the FBI exists, Ed. But we don’t. Never have. We’re too good at what we do for anyone to know about. Adrian gets a pass on being a public figure. But that’s because someone has to be a magnet for all the madness.”

  “Yeah, well, that defense only works so far. Futurists are a hot item these days. Every corporation has got them by the dozens. And they know who’s snooping on them and why because they’re doing the same thing to the competition. But if it isn’t kept polite, it’s all-out war. Probably the quickest way to get those Pandora’s boxes to open and let out all the hellacious tech no one ever wants to see let out is to go breaking into corporate’s most well-guarded secrets.”

  Klepsky sighed. He crushed one of those walnuts in his trench coat pocket he kept for moments of escalating aggravation. “How did this woman get on our radar then just by playing nice with the electronic eavesdropping?”

  “There’s always a gingerbread trail, sir. They want to bait us so they know what we’re working on. How else would they know? And they want to know how badly we want the information, which would suggest how close we are to a breakthrough, or how close we think they are to one. Thus the series of firewalls as opposed to just one, and the Russian nesting dolls from bigger to smaller that protect the smallest, most precious…”

  “Okay, I get it. What teasing breadcrumbs got you to look at her more closely?” Klepsky was finally moving in traffic again.

  “Nothing particularly special, sir. Just that of the scientists closest to perfecting AGIs, she’s the one.”

  “AGIs?”

  “Yes, sir. AIs, or Artificial Intelligences, are broken down into two types, AGIs and ASIs, Artificial General Intelligences and Artificial Singular Intelligences. The latter is most everywhere. It’s the fridge that talks to you and tells you you’re out of milk or drives your car for you. AGIs are…”

  “Skynet, like from the Terminator movie.”

  “Basically, yeah. No one has figured out how to evolve one to that level without having it turn on us, but that hasn’t stopped everyone from trying.”

  “And remind me why we suspect an AGI of being behind these golems again?”

  “It’s hard to believe any one human could have pulled off this many genetic, life-extending alterations in this little time in secret. To say nothing of reanimation. If it was a human, he would need a huge support team.”

  “What about an enhanced human?”

  “As in nootropic, smart-drug enhanced? Still not good enough. As in mind-chip-enhanced to make him way smarter and capable of far more mental calculations per second? Somewhat more likely, sir, but no one’s going to put one of those things in someone without monitoring the experiment closely. And a guy working alone wouldn’t have access to the necessary equipment. Anyone who does is being more closely monitored than…”

  Klepsky was stuck in traffic again and the people behind him were growing angry and honking their horns. Loud enough to block out the last part of Ed’s data dump. Klepsky doubted his final words would have saved the walnut in his hand from being crushed in any case. He didn’t exactly want to scream his end of the conversation out and risk being overheard so he engaged the noise cancellation technology. That just got the horn honking down to a tolerable level.

  “What about the possibility that this guy perfected his experiment already, took, say two, three, five years or more to work on it?” Klepsky suggested. “As much time as he needed. And he’s only now walking Adrian and the rest of us through the steps in his thinking process. Using us to error-check it for him before he injects himself with the immortality drug?”

  “I like it, sir! Very sexy theory, and Adrian-worthy, I might add. But alas, also not particularly likely. Not impossible, but not likely.”

  “Why not?”

  “Basically the same problem as with all the other scenarios. CRISPR went live circa 2012. Assuming he started as early as that with his alterations to the human genome, he’d still need a small army of researchers, the kind only corporations and universities have at their disposal, and he’d need to delegate the responsibilities for all the puzzle pieces to each of them…”

  “So it doesn’t matter how smart you are, in short,” Klepsky interrupted, “and whether you’re doing it the old-fashioned way, or with artificially boosted intelligence, the real issue is the timeframe involved and making all this progress in the dark without someone shining a light on you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Klepsky crushed another walnut in frustration. Considering Ed’s excitable nature, he was continually amazed by how he could debate most any issue affecting the outcome of their cases from a state of complete emotional neutrality. “I’m beginning to understand how you arrived at your short list and why Biyu got on it. She’s actually the most likely candidate, however unlikely she is. Because if anyone had taken all the preliminary steps already, it would be the Chinese, who alone are so
far ahead of us on human genome manipulation and on procuring AGIs. And all the other candidates were ruled out because…”

  “Geniuses though they may be, their requisite combination of aptitudes was just off by a little or by a country mile, and the time table just wasn’t on their side.” Ed finished his thought for him, to illustrate how simpatico they were. He never missed an opportunity to point up why they were so evidently meant for one another.

  “Thanks, Ed, for sparing me looking like the fool with Adrian with my ‘genius’ ideas. I’m going to have to give you a particularly good pounding when I get home tonight.”

  “Yes, sir!” Ed said, perking up. He giggled with excitement and lowered his voice. “Got the downstairs boxing ring set up. All ready to go. Just how many knockouts do I get, out of curiosity, before you know, you go to town on me in that other way?”

  “Until it gets tiresome, Ed. I beg to report I’m quite the boxing fan though. So you may be taking quite a lot of punishment before that happens.”

  He heard Ed gulp at the other end of the line. “I see, sir. But you wouldn’t actually kill me, would you?”

  “Wouldn’t think of it, Ed. Why ruin a good thing?”

  “Well then,” he said perking up again. “Be waiting for you when you get home, in nothing but my boxing gloves and tent-poled boxer shorts the instant I hear that key turning in the lock.”

  Klepsky chuckled. “Looking forward to it, Ed.” He hung up the line. “Christ, Klepsky, you’re not even gay. Has your life really come down to this? Is it really that hard to make a human connection anymore? That you just take what you can get? The first bit of excitement someone shows you when you walk into the room, makes you feel alive, and you stop asking questions? No wonder asexualism and bisexualism is on the rise. Can’t believe it took you this long to put two and two together.”

  He’d grown up with geeks like Ed rubbing their smarts in his face, condescending to him for being thick. His response back then was meeting them after school on their way home where no one could witness the comeuppance they had coming to them. Now, of course, all those geeky types from his childhood nightmares worked for him; it was another way of giving them their comeuppance for being so smart, having to follow his orders. He thought that was overcompensation enough.