Thomas cleared his throat and began again, “I flew you to Aruba with the best of intentions. I’m hoping to forge alliances and develop new accounts so — ”
“The conference is shit, Thomas, but I am looking forward to hearing the Foo Fighters play. I saw a clip of Dave Grohl online doing an excellent Christopher Walken impression. Have you seen that? Grohl is the man! He’s amazing.”
“Why exactly is this multimillion dollar conference shit?”
“It’s July in Aruba so it’s hot as balls. I should be onstage talking about how my division is developing AI to optimize human hormonal performance. Instead, all these venture capitalists seem to be interested in is weapons development. These guys will be on their deathbed fretting about Islamic extremists while they die of prostate cancer. My work might cure that someday. I don’t think there will ever be a cure for terrorism.”
“Okay, okay.” Thomas gave a smile that was supposed to placate me. “What you don’t seem to understand is our weapons division funds your research.”
“Short-term, long-term, I get the math. I’m good at cost-benefit analyses. It’s what tells me I should be back at the lab instead of mixing with the fancy people.”
“You’re making me wish you were back at the lab. This is an opportunity to network. You want to talk to other researchers but it’s the people with the purse strings you need to court first.”
“Courting. That’s an interesting turn of phrase.”
“These are important people, Chloe.”
“Like the guy from Dubai — Mr. Tarkasian? He’s the one who asked if I was sleeping with you.”
“Oh? What did you tell him?”
“I told him what I told you on that subject, Thomas.”
“Ah. A hard no.”
“I found it easy to say no.”
“Ouch. What did Tarkasian say?”
“He asked if I was brought along to accommodate new customers.”
“Accommodate? Meaning?”
“You know what he meant. I told him the tech I’m working on could save his life but I’d rather watch him die.”
“Chloe! Jesus!”
“I came here to work and to dance to The Pretender. No time for assholes.”
“I should have left you in your lab. You could have listened to Foo Fighters on Spotify.”
When he invited me to the Aruba conference, Thomas told me a bright light from every department would be attending. In the end, I was the only woman on the company jet and I only saw a couple of other department heads. The situation didn’t sit well but I’d dealt with this sort of thing before. The head of Human Resources was on my speed dial if the flirting leveled up to anything I considered dangerous. My work was valuable to the company and I wasn’t afraid to speak up. Thomas knew not to push me too far. They didn’t want to lose my input and they definitely didn’t want a lawsuit.
“Wine girl!”
Which brings me back to the thin guy in the shiny suit.
“Where’ve you been all my life, wine girl? I’m thirsty!”
“Chloe Robinson, with Prometheus Rembrandt BioSystems,” I said.
“Prometheus Rembrandt. Heh. When companies merge, the juxtapositions can really come out ridiculous, can’t they?”
“Do you want white wine?” I asked.
“White, yes.”
I hefted the bottle. “That’s a tragedy, I’ve only got red.”
“You’ll find a bottle of white over by the bar, honey.” He brayed and looked to his silent companion. The large moon faced man was probably worth a billion but dressed like a flood victim. Though he was deep into middle age, his cheeks were marred with acne. I felt sorry for him. He wore a tragically lopsided toupee and I guessed he had no friends to tell him the truth about his artificial hair.
The big man glanced up at me a second. Our eyes met and he looked away quickly. I suddenly liked him quite a bit. He seemed to have the good sense to be embarrassed by his companion.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then I sat beside the man in the shiny suit. “What’s your name, ‘honey?’” I asked.
“A name you should already know. My company does enough business with yours — ”
“Uh-huh. I guess you’re not as famous as you think.”
It was his turn to stiffen. “We are one of your company’s best customers. Why don’t you go fetch me that drink and we’ll talk about it?”
I was furious, of course. My rage was made worse because Thomas appeared before I had a chance to call the man out on his shenanigans. My boss did not look pleased but I gave him a bright smile. I could afford to be sassy. AFTER was the next generation of technology that could save the world. I didn’t understand then how urgently the world needed saving.
Chapter 3
DANIEL
I watched as my left hand curled around the top of the riot shield. The cop smashed my fingers with her baton. It hurt, but not as much as it should have. I tried again, faster. She attempted to smash my fingers but I was too quick for her the second time. I wrenched the shield away. She pulled the pistol from her holster and almost managed to point it at my gut. I slapped the Glock 22 out of her hand before she could pull the trigger.
I wondered what she would taste like. Had she showered recently? What if she had hepatitis or lyme disease? Would I contract it, too? If the microscopic parasites were airborne, how many people would get the disease? Would I eat her or would I bite her to make her like me? The world had changed in the space of an hour and a half. What were the new rules?
My right hand flashed out and grabbed my victim by the throat. She struck my elbow with the baton and it stung badly, as if a thousand bees buzzed up my arm.
I lunged, jaws snapping, and she recoiled with such force that she bashed her own head against the wall. She didn’t drop the baton but her grip loosened enough that prying the weapon from her fingers was no more difficult than taking a stick from a determined child.
I had her. All I had to do was grab her throat again and close my fist. Then I would feed. I would feed the parasites running my brain and, if I concentrated really hard, maybe I could mouth the word sorry between bites.
She dropped to the truck’s floor and I followed to bring my weight down, intent on pinning her. I would have killed her then but she still wore the gas mask. To my surprise, she reached for a can of mace that had been ready on the floor. She sprayed me in the face and I reeled back just as I spotted two more cops climbing into the back, riot shields held high, bearing down on me.
Two darts pierced my chest. Taser. All my muscles stiffened in torturous spasms. I fell to the deck. My fellow officers began to beat me down. Good for them.
The pain was bad. I waited patiently for the feeling that I was beginning to go away. It did not come quickly or easily. They hit me across the back, butt and legs too much and not enough in the head. They grunted with the effort, swinging their batons hard. I lived, impatient to die.
Someone’s knee came down on the back of my neck. As I stared out the back of the truck I saw someone in a silver asbestos suit shooting a thirty-foot arm of fire from a flamethrower. Joint Task Force 2 must have arrived to incinerate the bodies in the street, torching the evidence of how the world began to end. As the man with the flamethrower burned the bodies, a sickly sweet smell permeated the air. The bad smell came from burnt hair. The sweet smell wafted up from the cooking bodies. Cannibals didn’t care if their meals were raw or cooked, but the smell and noise might attract more zombies back to the epicenter of the outbreak.
I saw an amazing thing then. Startled, the man with the flamethrower looked up as a cannibal ran straight at him. It was a young woman, tall and athletic. By the way she pumped her arms as she sprinted, I had the feeling that she might have been a track star. Muscle memory is strong.
The guy with the flamethrower turned his weapon on his attacker. From ten feet out, she caught the flames straight in the face. The first thing a flamethrower does is burn off oxygen.
The victim burns second. First, they asphyxiate. The woman had enough air to scream and leap.
I watched her attack unfold as if watching a movie in slow motion. Her scream echoed around the canyon formed by the office building. Her clothes were on fire and burning off her body. The arc of her leap put her above the flame. The man was too slow to react. In a movement as graceful as any Olympic athlete, she crashed into him with both feet to his chest.
He stumbled back and fell over a corpse. She was still burning as she ripped the hood from his head and tore through the thin skin of his throat and into the carotid. She only went down when someone shot her with a heavy calibre machine gun.
Seeing it all in slow motion, I had time to watch and think. I noticed the moment the hunter became the hunted. I felt the defiance in the scream of the attacker. That was not pain or anguish in her voice. That was a war cry full of power. There was something incongruous, a nuance I never would have sensed before. The cannibal’s attack was a noble failure, so visceral and wild in its abandon. On the force, we always dehumanized our enemies. Here, in diseased attackers who were already barely human, I felt something new stir in me. For the first time I touched the possibility of respecting an enemy.
The harsh bite of steel cut into my wrists. I heard the ratcheting click of handcuffs secured far too tightly. The beating continued. I closed my eyes and accepted my punishment gratefully. I’d failed my mission. I deserved this.
Soon I’ll lapse into unconsciousness. Then I’ll be dead for real. Thank you.
This is not the apocalypse anyone expected. Endings are tricky that way. Every civilization stumbles, teeters and falls to ashes, dust and ruin. Everyone and everything falls out of memory. The surprise is that we are at all surprised.
Darkness enveloped me. This is death, I thought. It’s not so bad, but if I’m dead, who is thinking that death isn’t so bad?
I’d hoped I’d fade out while dreaming of my first girlfriend. She didn’t wear lipstick but she wore cherry lip balm. I loved to watch her put it on and I loved the taste of cherries as I kissed it from her lips. Cherry lip balm. I could dream for a moment but it might feel like a thousand years if I could just hold onto that cherished memory until I blacked out and went wherever dead people go.
Anything was preferable to obsessing over the taste of the raw meat from the security guard’s guts. A bright white light popped on above me but it wasn’t the light at the end of a tunnel we hear of from near-death experiences. People joke about being dead on the inside. That was the hell of it: I was alive, but only on the inside.
Chapter 4
CHLOE
“I see you’ve met Dr. Robinson. Chloe, this is Doug Hannah and Michael Cavanaugh of Nyx Management Group.”
“I’m Michael,” the thin man said. “CFO.”
He said it like he was announcing he was James Bond.
The moon faced man reached out to shake my hand. “Doug. Pleased to meet you.”
“He’s CEO,” Cavanaugh said. Then he added, “Dr. Chloe, huh? Nice. Your parents must be very proud. Everybody’s talking nanites now, it seems. I think it’s the geeks who love Marvel movies that have really pushed the nerds to speed up on nanotech.”
“Interesting theory, but I’ve been working on this research for years. Call me ‘Dr. Robinson.’”
Cavanaugh didn’t offer to shake my hand and I didn’t mind.
There was an awkward silence before Thomas jumped in. “We’re expecting big things from Chloe, very exciting developments in nano-cybernetics. She’s opened up the field to new possibilities.”
“Yeah, I saw the Forbes article. Nice bump to your stock, Thomas, but I’m still waiting on a bottle of white. And the customer’s always right, right?”
“Sounds like maybe you’ve had too much wine already, Mike,” the moon faced man said.
I liked the big guy even more now. I stood, ready to tear a strip off of Mike Cavanaugh but Thomas gave me a subtle shake of his head. His pleading eyes begged me not to act like myself. “I must excuse myself, gentlemen. I think I need a real drink, maybe two.” I stalked away, headed for the bar. As soon as I got to the bar, Thomas’s pilot and longtime friend, Brian Parry, came up to me as I was ordering a rum and Coke. “Where’s the boss? I’ve been trying to call. He must have turned off his phone.”
He seemed agitated. I flicked my head slightly. “Back there. What’s wrong?”
“We’ve got to head back.”
“Now?”
“Sooner than now would be better, I think.”
“Whatsamatter? Did Canada have a coup or something?”
“I got a call from head office. They said to tell Thomas it was Hans-Joachim Bohlmann calling.”
“Sorry, I don’t know that name.”
“I don’t, either, especially since it was a woman on the phone and Hans-Joachim sounds like a man’s name to me. She told me to tell Thomas right away and then get the jet ready for takeoff.”
I told Barry to get to Queen Beatrix International to warm up the jet and that we’d be along shortly.
Thomas was still schmoozing Cavanaugh when I touched his elbow. “Barry says you got a call from Hans-Joachim Bohlmann.”
I could tell by his reddening cheeks that his brain had slipped a gear. “Say that again.”
“Phone call. Hans-Joachim Bohlmann. You.”
“That can’t be right. Excuse me a moment.” He ducked away and pulled out his phone.
“Bad news from the front,” Cavanaugh said. “Plus, you forgot my bottle of white.”
Doug Hannah cleared his throat. “Dr. Robinson? Please excuse my friend’s coarse manners. I’ve read your research on the development of AFTER. Fascinating stuff.”
Cavanaugh looked at me with new eyes. “I’m familiar with it. You do cutting edge work, I guess.”
“AFTER is her baby, Mike,” Doug said. “Without Dr. Robinson, there’s no such thing as the new generation of organo-cybernetics. What do you expect the next big breakthrough will look like, Dr. Robinson?”
I knew there was a reason I liked him. I ignored Cavanaugh. “Call me Chloe, Doug. To answer your question, we’ve had success treating spinal cord injury and shutting down pain signals in mice. The possibilities are exciting.”
“Word is the Chinese are using nanites to fix detached retinas in a few hours with zero recuperation time needed,” Hannah said. “There’s a group of Finnish researchers in Helsinki who’ve found the machines are better at curing arthritic knees than human stem cell treatments. Personally, I’m fascinated by the possibilities of predictive AI using this technology, but you must be in a hurry to get the biological applications to market. Speculation around intellectual performance enhancement is very hot right now.”
“Yeah, I’ve been trying to cool that down but it’s been difficult. Everybody is in too much of a hurry since that Forbes article last summer.”
“You don’t have anything to bring to market?” Cavanaugh made it sound like a statement rather than a question.
“With this research, we have to work using an old bodybuilding motto: make haste slowly. The committees that approve research trials and patents can’t work as fast as microscopic AI, unfortunately. The biological possibilities are very exciting, though.”
“What’s your take on Neocortical Remodeling?” Hannah pressed. “If I was thinking of buying more stock in your company, how soon do you think you’ll have NR ready for market?”
“Again, we have to proceed cautiously but that will come. We’ve already outsourced much of our memory capacity to our phones. We’ve been talking chip implants since the ’80s — ”
“Augmenting human intellect and man-machine symbiosis were ideas cooked up in the ’50s and ’60s!” Cavanaugh said, “Time to push the accelerator through the floor and see how fast this baby can really go!”
“With AFTER, we’ll skip chip implantation and go straight to nano-chemical neural enhancement, reconnecting damaged brains. Traumatic brain injuries will be
a thing of the past in five to ten years.”
“I think that development will come faster than that,” Cavanaugh said. “Much faster.”
“Better to do it right than to do it fast.”
“In business, better to get there first. Take a damn chance!”
“Were you the kind of kid who blew up your high school science lab trying to fill a garbage bag full of hydrogen? There’s one in every class.”
Hannah guffawed. “There was a kid in high school who did that! He made his ears bleed when he lit the hydrogen. Boom! Took the summer for his eyebrows to grow back.”
Cavanaugh didn’t crack a smile. “I’m a numbers guy. I skipped science class.”
“I see.”
“You’ve never played sports, have you?” Cavanaugh continued. “Business is competition. Fast to market is what it’s all about. Those researchers in Finland, for instance, will eat your lunch. Maybe you started this big ball rolling but you have to follow through, get it across the finish line. The potential for this technology is so immense — ”
“It’s always such a pleasure to have my own work explained to me, Mr. Cavanaugh,” I said.
“Easy there, Michael,” Hannah said. “I think what my colleague is trying to say in his clumsy way is that we are eager to change the world. I’m not as young as you are, Chloe. I want to be part of that bright utopian future this technology can provide.”
As his boss tried to bring down the temperature between us, Cavanaugh gave me a smile I took as smug. He wasn’t about to let up. “Forget the lab rats. If you could skip to the end, what do you want to accomplish with AFTER? One thing.”
“There are many possibilities, but — ”
“One. Thing.”
“Very well. Imagine injecting a nano neural matrix into a surgeon’s brain,” I said. “The nanites could facilitate brain function. Depending on the program input, nanites could form new nerve connections or act as glial cells. The machined stem cells could support the function of the existing neurons. Over time, the relationship becomes reciprocal as the cyber learns from the organic. The surgeon uses his pre-existing knowledge base to teach the nanites as they enhance his brain function. That nano-neural matrix could even replicate itself and be recycled for the education of other doctors. Imagine getting medical training and decades of experience in a single injection. That’s one of my dreams.”
The NEXT Apocalypse (Book 2): AFTER Life: Purgatory Page 2
