by PJ Manney
“You just haven’t looked close enough.” Her brows knit together, and she stole glances at him. Finally, she blurted, “Do you really think you’re up for total transformation? This isn’t some Metaverse role-playing game. Everyone’s life is on the line.”
He bristled. “You doubt my commitment?”
“I know you’re committed, but there’s nothing in your background to indicate you’re devious enough to pull this off. You’ve gone through a lot of change since childhood, but you always remain yourself—Dudley Do-Right. Most people change as their circumstances change, and given the right motivations, a human being is capable of any behavior, however horrible, ridiculous, or inconceivable. It’s why most people who make a great deal of money mutate into the classic rich asshole. I’m sorry, but Fitzgerald was right. The rich are different.”
“And you’re saying I wasn’t.”
“No. And you have to be. To out-club the club.”
“I’ll change. I have no choice.” He sank into the seat. “Carter thought I did already. Amanda, too.”
“From the implants?”
“Yeah. I don’t think they disliked what I was becoming, just disliked I was changing, period. Maybe Carter was nervous I’d find out what was going on. But even implants didn’t make me smart enough. And Amanda . . .” Tom couldn’t look at Talia, concentrating on the gray, fire-scorched hills as they flew along Route 17, hillsides dead as far as the eye could see. But fire could bring life. The knobcone pines and cypresses only released seeds after fire. Wildflowers would flourish on the same black earth. “Amanda acted like my change created some disequilibrium and that was enough to trigger a miscarriage. I know I wasn’t to blame. I just wish she hadn’t died . . . upset with me . . .” He couldn’t speak anymore.
Talia watched him, worried. No one spoke for a few minutes. She fidgeted in the woe-filled emptiness.
“You know,” she finally blurted, “I don’t always agree with Fitzgerald. He also said there were ‘no second acts in American lives,’ but he died after he wrote it, so what the hell did he know? Must have been the booze, ’cause this country is nothing but second acts. Europe’s landless second sons become colonial landowners. Ragmen on the Lower East Side become Hollywood moguls. Poor boys and girls become businesspeople and celebrities, and when their arrogance or crimes trip them up, they write best-selling mea culpas and star in their own TV shows and make even more money. And isn’t your memory chip a second act? A second chance for those who lost theirs? In America, we rehabilitate, reform, and rebuild until the fat become thin, the addicted become sober, the plain become beautiful—all so that a nobody-from-nowhere can metamorphose into a celebrity for everywhere. We created Second Life, Web 2.0, Andy Warhol, and Madonna, the patron saints of reinvention. We even cornered the market on being “Born Again.” Haven’t we proven resurrection and reinvention are American talents?”
“Been preparing your fifteen-minutes-of-celebrity sound bite for long?” he deadpanned.
Talia blushed. She didn’t often, but when she did, the pink-peach flush across her cheeks looked remarkably pretty. “You don’t get a soapbox when you write puff pieces on CEOs.”
As plants grew stronger from fire, so would he. “I appreciate your concern. But I will change. I have the greatest motivation, and I acquired my primary weapon only yesterday: I know who Thomas Paine is and what makes him tick. They don’t, and they won’t know what’s coming. Brant said I lacked the killer instinct, the fire in the belly. He was wrong. I promise they’ll get their killer, and they’ll get their fire. Wait till Josiah, Bruce, and Carter get a load of Thomas Paine rising from the ashes.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Talia led her nascent golem to her hiding place. It was time to teach as many transformation secrets as she could. She shifted a chair and gently removed a slab of base molding in her bedroom. Tom could see where the seams had been, but in such an old apartment, he never thought to pull at every paint crack. A treasure trove of theatrical secrets emerged: colored contacts, hair dyes, wigs, clothing, makeup, body padding, all neatly packaged in clear ziplock bags.
She displayed them on the duvet. He stood close behind and couldn’t help flicking his stare between her red curls and the bottle of hair color in Delicious Mango. “It isn’t real?”
Grimacing, the muscles of her shoulders rippled, and she moved away.
“Classic male. Get this through your head—nothing is real. I’ve got tits and an ass God never gave me, and that makes me walk differently. That’s really important, because security cameras have been scanning and identifying gaits for ages. I’ve had facial surgery, and I wear sunblock at all times because I tan easily, and that wouldn’t match the new me.”
She sat on the bed, regarding him like an insect mounted on a pin. It was as unnerving as at the inaugural ball. “None of these things are enough for you. My creation of Talia Brooks predates ubiquitous biometric IDs, so when I was finally IDed, I was already Talia. Now they’ve got your irises, fingerprints, face, voice, vein patterns, DNA, all as Peter Bernhardt’s data . . .”
“I don’t think anyone has a vein pattern on me.”
“We’ll see. But we’ve eliminated facial and voice issues. I’ve got a guy who can create great semipermanent fingerprints from artificial-skin appliances made from these new organopolymers they use for skin grafts that will read as real prints. Or we may have to stick to polishing off your fingertips. There are people who legitimately have unreadable fingerprints, usually from job wear or accidents. And unless you know differently, I don’t think anyone knows enough genetic engineering to screw significantly with your identifiers without unwanted side effects. And we’re going to have to be really careful about DNA from here on. If they match your hair, they’ll know who you are.” She appraised his features. “Your skin . . . it’s pale. But easy to fix. Melanotan injections color the skin . . .”
He interrupted her. “Not really. It’s an analog of an alpha-melanocyte stimulating hormone from the pituitary gland. It makes additional melanin to create a tan where the skin couldn’t produce one before.”
“Correct, Mr. Spock. You are a scientist.”
“It has a side effect of increasing libido. Like Viagra, but not as controllable. That’s why it’s off the market.”
She turned away and shook out the blond wig in a clear plastic bag, so the hair was all lying neatly in the same direction. “Lucky you.”
“I beg to differ. Try being that guy. Not as fun as it sounds.”
“Lie back and think of America,” she quipped, still fiddling with the wig.
Did she lie back and think of America during the loyalty sex Tom assumed she performed?
She threw the wig back on the bed. “Anyway, there’s laser removal of your skin graft scars.”
“Don’t forget cosmetic and brain surgery scars . . .”
“Right . . . and your eyes . . . unless seriously damaged or diseased, eyes don’t change much, and contacts won’t work . . .”
A mirror hung over the bureau, and his bright blue Achilles’ Heel stared back at him. The arresting azure, and what his male ego always regarded as his best feature, would have to go. So, too, the iris pattern.
“Iris surgery?” he asked.
“Either laser decolorization or slip-in iris transplants. I’d go for the transplants to get the color and pattern you want, and we’ll put your new eye-D in the biometric data fields for them to find and match.”
“And you have a trustworthy ophthalmologist?” He counted on his fingers. “And dermatologist, prosthetician, let’s see, am I missing anybody? Oh, yeah. Urologist.”
“Of course. Doesn’t everybody?”
He didn’t want to know how she kept an army of contacts loyal. In his embarrassment, both at the thought and his discomfort, he picked up one of several pairs of Talia’s sunglasses and put them on. In the reflection, the mirrors of his soul were hidden from him. And her. And everyone who might want to know the real Thomas Paine.
&nb
sp; “Tell the docs I have acute, traumatic lesions on the striate cortex,” he said. “Full-field bilateral scotoma, and we’ll need appropriate MRIs of the visual cortex that match up with my new medical history.”
“Translation, Professor?”
“I’m brain blind. And I’ll have to prove it.” And there was someone who would be desperate to know this particular blind man, especially if Paine became everything the man’s offspring was not.
There were advantages to a blind man having the Hippo 2.0, although he wished the Cortex 2.0 was up and running. He quickly taught himself Braille, voice-recognition, and screen reading software systems. He could mentally map spaces and navigate a memorized area with ease. He learned to use the classic long, white “Hoover” cane, which became an extension of his body and perceptions. He practiced the behavioral tics of the blind, then practiced suppressing them, like the subtle head weaving, the lack of turning toward perceptual stimuli, the lack of facial reactions and social indicators. His presentation would fail if he were affected by darkness and disorientation like a sighted person.
Meanwhile, he added to Thomas Paine’s dossier online. Between his work and Dr. Who’s, the virtual golem was shaping up into a person, with a formidable past, shrouded in enough self-created secrecy to be a convincing member of the elite: a fascinating and mysterious present to keep people interested; a fatal flaw to lure the club; and a malleable future.
It was lonely work. He never saw Dr. Who or Mr. Money again, although Talia created a shared information exchange between one of her virtual personas and both crackers for communication. Except for after-hours medical procedures with skeleton staffs, he was a prisoner of Masonic Street until he could pass as a blind billionaire. He yearned to join humanity outside the apartment walls, like a man marooned on a spaceship in orbit around an Earth he could never return to.
Memories gnawed at him, more painful than surgery recuperation. Amanda’s death had no closure and he, the man who remembered too much, could not remember she was gone. When would he awake without turning to the right side of the bed, surprised by its emptiness? Nights were worse, plagued by nightmares where she didn’t recognize him and refused to take him home. He was abandoned night after night.
There were many dark hours to dwell on the past. When Amanda had been alive, he had noticed how much more he wanted to make love to her after his implants. Even after the miscarriage when she withdrew. At first he chalked it up to a postsurgical survivor’s high. When it continued, he wondered if permanent memories made the daily sexual thoughts that floated through men’s minds stick more concretely, embed in the Cortex 2.0 as an idea that wouldn’t go away. But as the weeks progressed, he realized something else. His mind was occupied by so much more information, he craved the oblivion of sex, the forgetfulness of love. To blast his brain with endorphins and oxytocin and all the other chemicals that made the world fall away and only you and your lover remain. Sex once had the power to do that, if only for a little while.
In daylight, with Talia’s presence and possessions all around him, he obsessed about her, complicating his mental state. He knew what toothpaste she used, but not where she was born; what foods she preferred, but not the family who raised her. Every clue could be deliberate misinformation. What precious little he thought he knew led to one conclusion: She was one complex and mysterious woman, and what guy wasn’t attracted to that? She was also beautiful, ridiculously so and even though self-consciously designed to entice, it didn’t matter. It still worked on his visual cortex and amygdala like nobody’s business. And she was smart. And compassionate, when she wasn’t trying to put him off. And intense. And under her influence, he saw reality as she saw it—where it was the two of them, back-to-back (if only she’d let his back touch hers) against the world.
As his desire for Talia increased, so did his guilt. He couldn’t help but react like any healthy male to female beauty, and until now he had had the self-control to consciously ignore it. But Melanotan injections made it hell. While his skin darkened, he sometimes fantasized about a well-placed nanobomb or laser scalpel destroying his brain’s amygdala, the seat of emotions, or the hypothalamus, which produced gonadotropin-releasing hormone. Both regions of the brain responded when given visual and olfactory sexual stimulation, and Melanotan only encouraged his hypothalamus to hitherto-unknown hormonal heights. Talia’s sight and smell intoxicated and engorged him. It was extremely uncomfortable. And thinking of America didn’t help.
It felt like Talia watched his every move, even after she left the apartment, hoping he would measure up to the transformation necessary. It was smothering. But she still avoided touching him as though her life depended on it. At first, her rejection annoyed him. Annoyance grew into anger, because it wasn’t just a lack of sexual interest. He frightened the person he relied on most, as though his touch carried a terrible contagion. He didn’t know why. And she wouldn’t tell him.
She hadn’t been afraid of him in DC, although her planned seduction might be considered taking one for the team. Her fear first appeared in the hospital.
Every so often, he’d catch his reflection, and the stranger looking back surprised him. Tan, muscular, with lean, angular, elegant features and distinguished white hair. His posture and movement was athletic, his voice Tom Waits–sexy. Scars were gone. His Silicon Valley geek-boy antistyle was replaced with clothes that would make Carter envious, and he practiced wearing them until they were part of him. Anyone would think he was ’da bomb.
Maybe it wasn’t his looks that scared her, but his brain. He pitied her fear of his improved mind. She had no idea this was only the beginning.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
After a long day of blindness, he rejoined the seeing a few hours every evening. It was his refuge of normality, when he tried to communicate with Talia as though they weren’t freaks living on the edge of existence. Making a bodybuilder’s dinner of wild salmon and broccoli in the tight galley kitchen, the oft-stirred combination of proximity, rejection, and cabin fever could not help but result in a chemical explosion.
The HOME was on. Footage from the National Guard played while a newscaster described the disappointing growth of National Guard regiments designed to protect Americans from the “enemy in our midst” and the reliance of state governments on private militias and military personnel contractors to keep peace in the homeland. Being “objective,” the journalist voiced no opinion on this development one way or the other.
Standing at the counter, Talia chopped the head of broccoli into small florets with a large chef’s knife. To her right, Tom placed two salmon fillets in a dish of marinade. He dipped his pinky and, deciding it needed more soy sauce, reached past Talia for the bottle on the far side of her cutting board.
His left hip brushed up against hers. She gasped and quickly faced him. He was right in her face, transfixed for a split second by her beauty and closeness. He leaned in. Her lips were moist, inviting . . . She reflexively skittered back, but cornered against the door of the pantry, she turned, knife pointed at his chest.
Reality slowed, anger rose, and he couldn’t stop either, carried away by a storm surge of emotions that the Hippo 2.0 wouldn’t let subside. He lunged, grabbed her wrist, slammed it against the pantry door, and pinned her against the wood panel with his body. She cried out in pain, but still gripped the knife. Before she could push him away, he smashed her free hand above her head to join its mate.
“What’s your fucking problem?” he hissed. She shrank from his presence and looked away, as though she could be absorbed into wood through wishing. It only enraged him more. “What disease do I have? Huh? Am I that hideous to you?”
She hyperventilated, eyes wild, jaw clenched, and nostrils flared, and looked everywhere but his face.
“I don’t move till you tell me what’s wrong,” he breathed in her ear. He pressed himself along the length of her body. Her breasts heaved against his solar plexus. His face overshadowed hers and the butcher’s knife hovere
d over their heads, while his brain switched biochemical gears, from the fight-or-flight surge of epinephrine to the neurotransmitter cocktail for sexual arousal. Their position might prove harder to maintain than he thought.
He squeezed the wrist of her knife-wielding hand until she grimaced in pain. “The truth. No more fucking bullshit.”
Water pooled in the corners of her averted eyes. Her lips trembled. All he wanted to do was kiss them.
Finally, she raised her face. Expression shifted as though actual cogs turned, her brain a geared steampunk contraption. He wished he knew what she was thinking.
A subtle nod of her head and he relaxed his grip slightly. She slowly lowered the knife, pausing halfway, hovering around his jugular.
“You don’t want to hurt me,” he whispered, eyes locked with hers. “You’re my guardian angel.”
The knife clattered to the floor, barely missing his left foot. He let go of her wrists. Her face unreadable, her hand touched his cheek, very gently, like his skin were some forbidden fruit.
Was she seducing her way out of this, using sex as a weapon? Was that Talia Brooks’s default salvation plan when threatened by men?
If it was, he didn’t care.
He slowly lowered his head to hers. He could smell her perspiration just under the remnants of her perfume, Poison. How could he know her perfume and not know her? The combination of sweat, Poison, and confusion made him dizzy.
Their lips touched, a gentle, exploratory kiss, her eyes squeezed shut.
He pulled away to run his tongue lightly around the edge of her ear and whispered, “Why do I scare you?”
Fingers clenched his hair, crushing his lips to hers.
He fumbled with the tiny buttons on her blouse. She took over, deliberately undoing each. Too slow, he ripped the shirt open. Buttons pinged on china, Formica, linoleum. He slid it off her shoulders and devoured her neck and shoulder, pulled her breasts from their bra and suckled them. The bra was yanked down, then off.
