Unkillable

by Dean C. Moore

  Adrian could hear the faucet in the sink behind the counter spiking on, even if he couldn’t see it.

  “Let the water wash away the sins of the world. Let it baptize you into a better life.” After saying the words out loud, he ran the words of his old Catholic priest over in his head. But Adrian was carrying sins now no water—blessed or unblessed—was ever going to wash away.

  Something else was stuck in his throat it wasn’t going to wash away either.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Adrian could hear the celebrating going on from three floors down. He kept walking up the stairwell all the same as if fighting the gravity of a thousand suns.

  The louder the party noise got, the grimmer and darker he got. The party should really be for Ray Bright, a celebration of his life that had been wrongfully taken from him. The impact he left was tangible and enduring. The impact Adrian left, less so. His legacy would be all the futures that were never born. And probably just as well they weren’t. Those nightmare worlds that played out in his head every night he’d take to the grave with him. No one else would know about them but him. They were his private getaway spots, his mental vacations to get him through his time in hell. Why would the devil cheat him of them? When they would be far more exquisite torture than any he could enact.

  But Adrian knew if he said all that he would spoil everyone’s fun. They sacrificed their entire lives for the greater good, so they saw no big deal in Ray Bright doing it. Besides, Ray was one of them, just here to make sure they left the world a better place than when they’d come in. And each one, in his place, would have been happy to do the same, go out dangling at the end of the rope, with a gun pointed in their face, shoved off the edge of a cliff…

  Adrian paused before the door, listening.

  “And the Booby Prize First Class, as opposed to the Booby Prize Second Class and Third Class, to all those silver and bronze medalists out there, the gold medal goes to Finnian Wakeman, who single-handedly bagged giant spider poop,” the first round of laughter had already started, “flash froze it in liquid-nitrogen, mind you,” the second round of laughter commenced, climbing over the first round, “only to get it back here to find it had degraded to nothing more than tobacco stains.” The third round of laughs ensued, louder than the first two. “The greatest, most brilliant find of the most useless piece of information there ever was on a case!” The room erupted with laughter. Even Adrian had to smile from his side of the door. At least he’d timed it as he’d hoped. Everyone had gotten their moment in the spotlight.

  Adrian took a deep breath as he opened the door to their floor of the building, preparing himself for the explosion of noise on the other side. It wasn’t preparation enough. It damn near blew him back against the wall like a funny commercial for top quality stereo speakers.

  “There he is!” screamed Klepsky’s voice.

  The kids—in their late teens and twenties and some even in their thirties—the latter, old men, for their line of work—rushed him and had him up over the sea of upturned arms, rock concert style, just as Klepsky had threatened they’d do. They were all chanting “Maslow! Maslow! Maslow!” as the conveyor belt of arms moved his supine body along.

  “Alright, you guys. If you’re going to make me seasick, it better be with the tickets for the around-the-world cruise.”

  He got some laughs, and as he was nearly at the other end of the room now, they set him down.

  “That’s enough excitement thrown Adrian’s way for one night, boys and girls,” Klepsky said. “You know how these older guys are, no stamina.” He got some laughs as the kids went back to celebrating one another, quickly forgetting about the two older men entirely. All but Ed, of course, who twitched his eyebrows at Klepsky from a distance hinting at greater glories to come for the two of them later that night.

  Then Ed did an about face, drink in hand, amazingly not spilling a drop, and joined the rest of the party revelers.

  Adrian walked the bank of monitors against the glass walls of the inside rectangle, framed by the outermost offices, running highlights of their investigation into Golem Guy on endless loop. There must have been sixty of the monitors, each flat-screen about twenty-five inches on the diagonal, about twenty to each of the long walls, ten to each of the shorter walls. In front of the monitors were trays full of goodies lining the wrap-around buffet. Mostly cakes and cookies and cannoli, punch bowls of spiked Kool-Aid. The young techies subsisted on the same diet of raw sugar they did when they were running around their parents houses screaming at the age of five.

  Adrian decorated his empty plate as he strode along the embankment of monitors, glancing away from the monitors only briefly.

  Klepsky looked content to follow him and do some second-round piling on of his plate, when, to light applause and whistles, the big cakes were wheeled in, each one stuffed with a stripper. A male Adonis popped out of one, a female beauty pageant winner out of the other. And once again the crowd went wild.

  “Catch you later, Adrian,” he said, squeezing his friend’s shoulder hard enough to ensure he saw a chiropractor the following day, all in absently administered affection, of course.

  Adrian kept his distance. The lone wolf act really wasn’t an act in his case. This many people this close together, his natural reaction was to flee. But he was also looking for something on those monitors, and so far it hadn’t come into view.

  He was at the fifteenth one sometime later when he said, “There!”

  There was dead silence in the room. Not one movement, not even a twitch. Not even the sound of breathing. It was like they were all waiting for it. They all knew. Only the two clueless party favors were writhing and undulating and waiting for more money to be stuffed in their G-strings, wondering what the hell was going on.

  Adrian lowered his plate. “There’s the real killer we’re after. The guy in the fridge,” he said, pointing to the room where Biyu was staring into a microscope and Klepsky was staring at her cleavage.

  “Adrian, for God’s sake,” Klepsky begged, “can’t you give us this one night?”

  “Get Celine on the phone, Klepsky. Though it’s probably too late. Unless I miss my guess, the world as we knew it is already over.”

  Adrian was running for the door.

  Klepsky hot on his heels.

  Everyone was returning to their stations.

  Leaving the two dancers to dance for one another. Which as it turned out, suited them fine. It didn’t take them long to forget anyone else in the world even existed.

  ***

  Adrian was panting when he ran into Biyu’s work area. The beads of sweat on his forehead bursting like popcorn in a microwave. Each one felt like an acupuncture needle prick. He doubted there were enough Chinese doctors in all the world to soothe his currently agitated state. Hot on his tail, Klepsky’s breaths beating down on the back of his neck sounded more like the respirator that kept a comatose patient alive, raspier, less rhythmic. Adrian ripped the door to the fridge wide open.

  The frozen Asian man inside was gone.

  They both turned towards Biyu. “What happened to the guy inside the fridge?” Klepsky asked.

  She shrugged. She had been entirely unmoved by their bursting unannounced into her work area. Emotionally more deadpan than a corpse in a coffin at its own wake. “He scheduled for pickup today. For incineration.”

  Adrian glanced at Klepsky. “That was the hard deadline he couldn’t push. He had to have his problem solved by today.”

  Biyu checked her watch and checked her calendar on the computer. “Huh. He not schedule for pickup for another couple hours. The company must just have been early. It happen sometimes.”

  “Not this time,” Adrian said, fuming mad at himself. Absolutely red-faced. He could feel the tingly sensations all over his facade that usually accompanied being flushed.

  “You don’t know that, Adrian,” Klepsky said, not really believing it himself.

  “What all excitement about, you two?” Biyu asked.r />
  “Your dead body,” Adrian said, tasting the acid spewing out of his mouth as his bile rose up through his throat, “has been busy perfecting the unkillable man. The only thing he didn’t have time for was the part about keeping the cellular scaffolding that keeps him from melting the instant he stepped out of the freezer. But the FBI-FD was kind enough to provide that missing piece for him. And now that he’s gone, the world as we all knew it is over.” His voice rose higher as his eyes locked on Biyu. “I’d strangle you with my bare hands. And no one would dare to prosecute. But that’s all I need is to get addicted to those cravings.”

  “Easy, Adrian. She had no way of knowing.” Klepsky’s voice was thick with empathy for both of them.

  “What you saying… It just not possible.” From the way she couldn’t finish the first sentence, and the way her eyes went distant by the end of the second, Adrian knew she was fooling herself too. “I check, double, triple and quadruple check, for weeks afterwards, to make sure there no brain activity. All vital sign had ceased.”

  “With all the superfluids you pumped him up with, doc,” Adrian said, “his mind could have been zooming at body temperatures several hundred degrees below what would kill a human.”

  Her eyes went from distant to boring a hole through him on half a heart-beat. She rose to better convey her sense of indignation. “There no way…”

  “He could guess your formula? Or part of it?” Klepsky said. “This is Adrian Maslow, doc. He’s the brightest one in the room, not you. I bet you don’t hear that too often.”

  She collapsed onto her stool, the million mile stare painted on her face again. “How could I not see that? I should have realize…”

  Adrian didn’t have time for her self-recriminations. He turned to Klepsky. “How long did Celine say we had, based on the progress from Golem to Golem?”

  He looked at Adrian like the doctor who didn’t want to tell the parents their kid was dead, only with more empathy, and more fear in his eyes. “We passed that point a few hours ago. It was a geometric progression, from the very beginning. If someone could please explain to me how that’s even possible.” Klepsky mumbled the final few words. He took the microscope Biyu had been using when he last visited her and bashed it against the stainless steel table top until he’d dented the hell out of that one segment of table. When he couldn’t break the instrument that way, he tore it apart with his bare hands.

  In the silent wake of his roar, Adrian explained, “His mind is a DNA computer.”

  Klepsky stomped over to Biyu, picked her off the floor until he was looking up at her and shook her. “Is that true?”

  “Yes,” she said feebly, as if he still couldn’t wake her from the sleepwalking, shell-shocked state she was in.

  He set her down, stomped over to Adrian, did the same routine with him. As he shook Adrian overhead, he said, “What the hell does that even mean?!”

  “It mean he can do millions of calculations in parallel in his head—simultaneously,” Biyu explained, adding the “simultaneously” in case Klepsky didn’t get the “in parallel” part.

  Then with a more vacant look in her eyes, she said, continuing to think out loud, “The feedback loop from his experiments with the golem drove geometric progression of his progress. How did I not connect your case to my investigations sooner?”

  He turned back to Adrian. “Explain!”

  “Our own brains are DNA computers, Klepsky, they just don’t work nearly as rapidly or as efficiently. By doing things in parallel, what might take years or even decades, can be done in days or weeks.”

  “He only had days!” Klepsky protested.

  “That was all he needed,” Adrian replied, sounding like a deflating balloon.

  Klepsky forced Adrian into a stool.

  “How…?” Klepsky never finished the sentence. He didn’t have to.

  “Rory Bateman was the real golem. He was brought into being to do the unkillable man’s bidding for him, before he was unkillable. It wouldn’t have taken much to sway a softer mind like his. I only had to sit with Bateman for five minutes to know he was no mastermind. I think you’ll find he has a mindchip somewhere inside him. Probably a university research experiment to see if they could settle his psychosis with the chip implant, get it to do what the meds failed to do. It wouldn’t have taken a souped up DNA brain long to hack the chip and take Rory over, make the golem do his bidding for him.

  “Everything after that was just theater of the absurd for our benefit. To distract us and keep us away from catching the real killer’s scent. He managed to consume the mental energies of an entire department of futurists from the bottom of the pyramid all the way to the top. And you can bet he did it with just one of those mental processes running in his brain, while keeping the tens of thousands of others not involved with spinning the story around us like a web focused on his real challenge, becoming immortal and unkillable.”

  “You knew there was only one way this puzzle got solved,” Klepsky accused, “you just couldn’t find the missing piece. Didn’t help that I’d written this line of investigation off as a dead end.”

  Adrian refused to rise to the bait. He had bigger problems to worry about right now than some clue getting past Klepsky.

  “So, this guy isn’t out there limping around on his last leg,” Klepsky said, “taking all the time in the world he needs now to finish his formula. That’s what you’re saying.” Adrian realized the other shoe had finally dropped for Klepsky. “He’s already finished it. So even if we found him we couldn’t stop him.”

  Adrian grabbed his hat. “We have to find him. And we have to stop him. Someone else gets to him, some other government agent, or he hops a plane… and it’s our worst fears come true.”

  “How do you stop an unkillable guy, Adrian?”

  “I’ll think of something.” Adrian was already headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?” Klepsky barked.

  “To see Veronica, of course. Sure as hell not hunting that guy without a ninja assassin at my side. Actually, she’s ten different kinds of assassin, including the Navy Seals kind. I could use them all right now.”

  Klepsky was left in the empty room to stare at Biyu. He felt sorry for manhandling her earlier. He suddenly realized what Adrian felt like, strangling Ray Bright, for the first time. He thought he knew back then. But right now, as much as he hated to admit it, if it would put the genie back in the bottle that had managed to get out, he’d strangle her happily. He could just imagine her opposite him at the table during all those romantic dinners they’d yet to have together thereafter, enjoy his time with her posthumously.

  “Well, congratulations, doc. You’re far more brilliant than you thought you were. That’s the good news. The bad news is we have to destroy all your research, and pull you into our program at the FBI-FD to make sure no one else gets their hands on you, and so we can keep you under twenty-four-seven surveillance.”

  “I will…!” She meant to say “I will not!” but she ran out of righteous indignation before she could get to the end of that sentence. When she said, “I will…” again, she meant it this time, for however beaten she sounded. “I will comply.”

  As an afterthought, she added, “You don’t think…?” There it was. The bargaining stage of Elizabeth-Kubler-Ross’s five stages of dealing with grief and loss. In this case, the death of her project.

  “Here’s what I think. I think you built something and you had no idea if it would work or not. You didn’t have all the pieces you needed for a nextgen breakthrough. So you took a Hail Mary pass. You built something that might just be able to build itself, evolve itself to do the superhuman. That’s a hell of an accomplishment in and of itself.

  “But here’s the thing. This one evolved into a psychotic, deranged mass murderer. And that was before he got all the way turned on. He might still get to fulfill his mission of putting an end to us all if that’s part of his real agenda.

  “Maybe the next one you cook u
p will be better. But who knows? You willing to risk that—anywhere outside of the kind of oversight we can provide?”

  Silence greeted him as she processed what he was saying. Then, “No, I guess not.”

  “In that case, let’s get started. What do I get to tear apart first? I’m in a distinct tearing-apart mood.”

  ACT FOUR

  THE UNKILLABLE MAN

  TWENTY-SIX

  “You pay money for this stuff? My five year old will do it for you for free,” Adrian said walking the hall filled with abstract artwork. The bright flat white lighting had evidently been chosen to show off the paintings. Considering they all looked like someone vomited their psychedelic Kool-Aid onto the canvases, about all they were doing was upsetting his stomach.

  “We heard you were a man of class and distinction,” the executive secretary said deadpan, in her adieu to fashionable quips to go with her fashionable wardrobe. He supposed he had it coming. She had one of those faces you could project a hundred and one dramas into, and she was likely guilty of all of them. With her alabaster white skin, short-cut red hair, blue eyes and trim figure—she wasn’t at all shy about showing her legs—she was a quite attractive woman in her fifties. Though Adrian’s sense was she wore her asexuality with a badge of honor. Her vibrator at least wouldn’t leave the stain of humanity on her. He found it strangely easy to empathize. “And you don’t have a five year old, we checked.”

  “The joke wouldn’t have worked without the five year old. It’s called narrative license. Though possibly a six year old would have worked just as well.”

  “We’re absolutely crazy about Andy Warhol,” she said. “We’re heading down that hall next.”

  “Him I like. He didn’t make any pretenses about crass American commercialism.”