You, Human

by John Skipp

  Smyth stopped, looked at Paul, and grinned. “You should see your expression—Bo-Bo the Dog-Faced Boy looked more intelligent.”

  “Jim Woodward said the exact same thing to me last night.”

  “I know,” replied Smyth. “It’s a great line, so I stole it. But don’t tell him.”

  “We’re not that close.”

  “Bullshit—but good delivery.”

  “Carmen Borgia gave me a bunch of grief on my delivery.”

  “That a fact?” Smyth moved to his desk and sat down, then picked up a folder and opened it.

  Jesus; even doing that, he’s hypnotic.

  “You planning on taking a seat or would you prefer to buy real estate and build?”

  Paul took a seat.

  Smyth finished looking through the folder, at one point removing the confidentiality agreement Paul had signed and asking him to verify that it was signature, then closed the folder, tossed it onto the desk, sat back, and said: “Ever visit your dad in the slammer?”

  Something inside Paul’s stomach pulled a knife from its pocket and began whittling away at the tissue. “Wh-what?”

  “You heard me.”

  “How the hell do you know about—”

  Smyth sighed impatiently, then said: “Your mom was acquitted of complicity in your sister’s death and committed suicide five months later. You were living with one of your aunts by then. Your dad was found guilty of second-degree murder and is currently serving his time in the state pen. Have you ever visited him there?”

  Paul swallowed. Once. Very loudly. “No. And I never will. The fucker can rot in there for all I give a shit.”

  Smyth nodded. “An honest one. Points in your favor.”

  Paul reached into his jacket pocket and took out a cigarette. He almost never smoked but always kept a pack in his pocket for times when he was either severely anxious or dangerously angry. Right now he was a lot of both. He lit up, inhaled, then released the smoke through his nostrils.

  “What if I were to tell you this is a non-smoking building?” said Smyth.

  “I’d tell you I don’t care.”

  “You’re upset. I can tell. You’re breathing fire.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Not really, but I try.”

  “How do you know all of this? I mean, I can see how your background check would turn up all the information about my parents and my sister—”

  “—did you enjoy the dedication on the radio? I thought you might like it.”

  “Yeah. It was a rockin’ good time. How could you possibly know that my ‘average’ arrival time for appointments was twenty minutes early?”

  “We’ve been watching you.”

  Something cold slid a slow path down Paul’s spine. He pulled in another drag. “You’ve been having me tailed?”

  “Tailed? Wow. Very forties-tough-guy, very noir-ish, very Raymond Chandler. Gave me chills. See my goosebumps? Never mind. Yes. We’ve been ‘tailing’ you for almost eighteen months.”

  Paul stared at him, unblinking. “They’re the same,” he said, more to himself than Smyth.

  Smyth sat up a little straighter, seemingly taken aback but something he hadn’t been expecting. “I beg your—”

  “Last night when I was talking with Borgia, something about the way he spoke kept ringing bells in my head but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Now I know. Jim Woodward, him, and now you. All three of you speak the same way.”

  Smyth shrugged. “We’re businessmen, on-the-go guys. Gotta be quick on our feet, quick in our speech; helps us to look like we’re five steps ahead of everyone. In fact—”

  “That’s not it,” snapped Paul. “It’s not that your speech shares some similarities—it’s almost exactly the same, all three of you. The inflections, the pauses, the cadences and turns of the phrase you employ … it’s too precise to be a coincidence.”

  Smyth stared at him for several moments and then, slowly, a smile spread across his face, revealing absolutely perfect white teeth. “I knew you were the right guy for this.”

  “For what? What’s going on?”

  “Just a sec.” Smyth pressed the intercom. “Cathy?”

  “Sir?”

  “Two minutes, thirty-one seconds.”

  “Wow.”

  “Tell me about it. Make a note about the speech patterns, will you?”

  “Done, sir.”

  Smyth released the button and beamed at Paul. “Do you know how long it would have taken most people to spot that? Days, more probably weeks, if ever.” He rose from behind his desk and gestured for Paul to follow him to one of the bookshelves, the only one in the office actually containing books.

  “You haven’t really explained anything to me.”

  “Patience, Paul, patience … but I am surprised you haven’t asked why there are so few books and so many toys in here.”

  “Let’s say I have.”

  “Then let’s say I tell you that Scylla Enterprises has dozens of subsidiary companies, as well as controlling interests in companies which were not originally part of our organization. We make everything from dolls to guidance systems for airplanes. We are involved in research to find cures for cancer, AIDS, Parkinson’s, migraine headaches, and hangnails. We build cars and houses. We make major Hollywood motion pictures. We work to save the environment. We supply the space program with under-the-table funding. We assassinate dictators. We supply weapons for oppressed peoples to stage coups in Third World countries. We fight famine. We own record companies. We—oh, I could go on, but … let’s see—ah! Did you ever see Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie? ”

  “Yes.”

  “Remember the offices of Engulf & Devour, the evil corporation? Remember their slogan on the wall: ‘OUR FINGERS ARE IN EVERYTHING’? Well, that’s us, in a way. There’s not a lot we aren’t involved in. But I digress.”

  “Can I ask who controls Scylla?”

  “I do. There is no board of directors, only some folks we keep on hand for show. I’ll tell you much more later, but for right now, let’s get back to your having spotted the similarities in the speech patterns of myself, Carmen Borgia, and your friend Jim Woodward.” Smyth looked over the bookshelf. Paul counted: there were exactly thirty-five books, ranging from a couple of bestsellers to more literary fiction (The Complete Stories of Kobo Abe) to older, more obscure novels (Tryst by Elswyth Thane and Trout Fishing in America by Richard Broughtigan), several textbooks on math, surgery, and home plumbing repair, a handful of children’s books, various editions of the Bible, Koran, and Talmud, poetry collections, and other books whose titles gave no hint to Paul as to what they were about.

  “Your reading tastes are a bit … eclectic.”

  “Oh, yes … I like to spend my evenings going from Stephen King to dissertation of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, with a bit of See Spot Run and Goodnight Moon thrown in for good measure.” He pulled a thick volume from the lower shelf: Famous Documents From History. Paul noticed that only a few pages were marked, and as Smyth opened the books, saw that only one or two passages per page had been highlighted.

  Smyth handed the book to Paul. “Please read this aloud, only, read it as Burt Lancaster—you do Lancaster, right?”

  “He’s one of my favorites.”

  “Please read the first few lines.”

  “Can I have a drink of club soda with lime first?”

  “Club soda?”

  “In my act, I always take a drink of club soda with lime before doing Lancaster. It helps ready my vocal cords.”

  “Go for it.”

  Paul went to the bar and fixed his drink, took two shorts sips and one deep swallow (just like in his act), held the last bit of it in his throat for a few seconds, then swallowed. He hummed like Kermit the Frog very quickly, then took the book up again and recited the first six lines of The Declaration of Independence in his best Lancaster.

  When he was finished, he handed the book back to Smyth, who replaced it on the shelf and sai
d, “That was amazing. You do Lancaster better than anyone I’ve ever heard. Quite possibly better than anyone ever has.”

  “Thank you. I don’t think I’m that good, but—”

  “Do you know much about the science of fingerprinting, Paul?”

  “Not really.”

  Smyth gently took hold of Paul’s right hand and held it up. “Each fingerprint pattern on each finger, as I’m sure you know, is unique. Because you have ten fingers, the ten fingerprints are going to differ slightly, but all of them will share certain characteristics, namely the whorl pattern and reference points—by those, I mean the semi-circular patterns of the lines and the various breaks, scratches, and marks that are found along those lines. Are you following me so far?”

  “I think so.”

  Smyth released Paul’s hand. “Voice-prints are the same way. Each person has certain patterns to their speech, certain ways of breathing which affect the timbre, certain patterns of inflection, certain base vibrations that make it impossible to exactly duplicate their voice by electronic means. But, like fingerprints, there are ‘reference points’ in the patterns. In fingerprinting, one need only match six reference points for identification; the best impressionists can match up to eight voice-print reference points. Watch this.”

  He pressed a button on the wall, and a hidden panel slid open to reveal a pair of computer monitors built into the wall. Under each monitor was a keyboard. Smyth pressed a key on each and the monitors flickered to life.

  “What this?”

  “This, Paul, is a state-of-art, high-tech, one-of-a-kind thingamajig, not to be confused with your run-of-the-mill whatchama-callits used by NASA or the commonplace whoseewhatsits you can pick up at Radio Shack. This, Paul, is a digital speech analyzer. Listen.”

  He hit a key, and Paul heard himself doing Burt Lancaster reading from the Declaration. As he read, a series of jumpy red lines rose from the bottom of the monitor screen and flickered at the top like the tips of flames. Every time a line flickered, a blue dot appeared and remained in that spot on the screen.

  “Now, old Burt himself, from The Devil’s Disciple, I think. One of the costume dramas he did, anyway.”

  Another key was pressed, and Burt Lancaster himself read from the Declaration. Jumpy red lines, leaving hundreds of small blue dots at their flicker-points.

  “Notice anything?” said Smyth.

  “No …?”

  “Nothing up my sleeve.” He entered a command. “… presto!”

  Both recordings were played simultaneously, two sets of jumpy red lines on the same screen, two sets of small blue dots … only it seemed now to Paul that there weren’t as many small blue dots.

  Once it was finished, Smyth enhanced the uneven line of blue dots, then entered another command: a blinking green cursor made its way across the screen, stopping at each set of blue dots that overlapped. Once that was finished, the dots which didn’t overlap disappeared from the screen.

  “Look at that,” said Smyth. “Eighteen matching reference points would qualify as a perfect-enough match; you hit twenty-three points in your imitation. The best I’ve ever seen … heard … you know what I mean—the best I’ve ever encountered matched sixteen. You, sir Cormier, are the best impressionist I’ve ever encountered.”

  “Again, thanks … but can’t you just reproduce their voices digitally?”

  “If all I were interested in was movie stars, yes—but even then I’d be limited to the soundtracks of their films and whatever recorded interviews I could lay hands on. But hold the questions, we’re not finished yet.”

  For the next ninety minutes, Smyth had Paul listen to the voices of various celebrities, politicians, and people whose voices he didn’t recognize, then imitate them while reading selected passages from a book chosen at random. Each time, Paul hit no fewer than twenty reference points in the voice-prints.

  When the last of them had been done, Smyth nodded his head and grinned. “I had you do this so you could see just how good your impressions are. Don’t say anything yet. The collection of books on this shelf weren’t selected at random, nor were the highlighted passages inside them. If you were to start reading only the highlighted passages in the first book on the top, and repeat the process until you came to the last highlighted passages in the last book, you would have made ninety-seven-point-eight percent of every sound in the English language—more than enough to enable someone with sophisticated enough equipment to accurately reproduce another person’s voice—”

  “—and program that voice to say whatever you wanted.”

  Smyth nodded. “I’ve had language experts working on this for years. Part of your new job, Paul, would be to listen to recordings of other peoples’ voices—not celebrities, but everyday individuals whom we have recorded—then learn their voices, imitate them as well as you did old Burt’s here, and then—”

  “—read the highlighted passages from these fifty books so you can reproduce their voices, making them say whatever you want.”

  Smyth shook his head. “That’s only a part of it—still, don’t make it sound so ominous.”

  “I don’t see why—”

  Smyth held up his hand, silencing Paul. “We’re done here for the time being. Go with Ms. Brown. The next part of your trial period starts now.”

  “But—”

  “No questions. I’ll tell you everything you want to know later. For now, go.” Smyth pulled a small remote control unit from his pocket and opened the office doors. Ms. Brown and BuzzCut stood there waiting for Paul.

  “Mr. Cormier,” said BuzzCut. It sounded too much like a command.

  Paul stepped back out and the doors closed behind him.

  “I take it things went well?” asked Ms. Brown.

  “You tell me—I have no idea how things went … except very quickly.”

  “Feeling a little confused?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  BuzzCut nearly smiled. “Wrong reading.”

  “Huh?”

  Ms. Brown laughed once, very softly, then cleared her throat. “Our research has shown that to be a favorite phrase of yours, and I’m afraid the staff has, well … borrowed it from you.”

  “It’s called stealing.”

  “I know,” said Ms. Brown. “But we’re far too nice people to do something like that.”

  “Is everyone here a comedian?”

  BuzzCut gently took hold of Paul’s hand and guided him back through the maze of doors and corridors until they stood facing a different elevator than the one in which Paul had come up.

  “Are you allowed to talk to me?”

  BuzzCut shrugged. “Don’t see why not.”

  “Have you been with Scylla for long?”

  “About fifteen years.”

  Paul waited for BuzzCut to elaborate, but the man offered no further comments.

  “Ho-kay, then … can you tell me what’s going to happen now?”

  “We’re going to make a pick-up.”

  “Uh-huh …?”

  The elevator doors opened. They rode down into a private parking garage located below the Scylla building. There only a few dozen cars parked down here even though the garage could have easily held twenty times as many vehicles. With parking space the rare and priceless commodity it was downtown, Paul knew without asking that this private garage had to set Schlla back a tidy sum each month.

  He followed BuzzCut until the other man stopped beside a car that was so incredibly non-descript Paul almost missed seeing it.

  He walked over and stood by the passenger door. BuzzCut was grinning. Paul wondered if the man were ill.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” replied BuzzCut, unlocking his door. “It’s just it never fails to amuse me how new recruits always nearly walk right past this car when they come down here with me. Don’t look at me that way, I’m not trying to say you’re stupid or nothing; this car was designed not to be noticeable.”

  “Why?”
>
  Both of them climbed inside, put on their seatbelts, and Buzz-Cut started the engine as he continued to explain. “Okay, I might as well explain some things. First off—and whether or not you want to take my word on this is up to you—if you are offered a contract with Scylla, there are going to be times when you’ll be asked by Mr. Smyth to do something that on the surface, is gonna look like it maybe ain’t so legal. Sometimes it isn’t, but you ain’t never gonna have to worry about being arrested or nothing like that.”

  Paul stared at him for a moment. Then something occurred to him. “The plates on the car, they’re—”

  “—government plates. Federal. You’re the first recruit to notice that. Good eye.”

  “So Scylla is also a branch of the Federal government?”

  “Not officially.” They had driven up to the exit by now, and BuzzCut turned effortlessly into the pre-lunch-hour traffic. “But if for some reason the police were to stop this car, the officers who did the stopping would be on paid suspension the minute they got off the horn from calling in the plate number.”

  Paul’s earlier anxiety now bordered on outright fear tinged with panic. “How powerful is Scylla?”

  “Scylla is Mr. Smyth, Paul, and Mr. Smyth is probably one of the ten most powerful men in the world—not just one of the richest, but the most powerful.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Remember when I told you that there were going to be times when you’d be asked to—”

  “—do something that on the surface doesn’t look so legal?”

  BuzzCut nodded his head. “We’re on our way to do such a thing right now.”

  “Will it be dangerous?”

  “There’s always that possibility—that’s why the confidentiality agreement, and that’s why this is called a ‘trial period.’”

  Paul felt his hands begin to shake, a sure sign that he was three breaths away from a panic attack. “And this thing, this not-so-legal-looking-on-the-surface thing we’re on our way to do, what might it be?”

  “It might be any one of a million things.”

  Paul shook his head. “Let me guess: Wrong reading?”

  BuzzCut’s only response was to smile.

  “Fine,” said Paul, “then this thing that we’re going to do … what is it?”