“Yeah, that’s what bothers me.”
“Just out of curiosity, how many of these love letters,” she held up the thermos, “do you get exactly?”
“At least one a day. Of course the FBI has more people around me than the president. They filter out most of the madness.”
She stowed the thermos on the seat between them and took the wheel back. The speed immediately picked back up as did the circus stunts behind the wheel.
He supposed she was clearing her head in her own inimical fashion, as he allowed himself to drift off. He liked his girlfriends best for this one quality. Sure, they were damn sexy, each of them. And damn smart. But he felt at peace with them, more than at any other time. And peace meant a lot to a man like him, in his line of work.
After the medicine had a chance to take, she finally said, “Well?”
“I think there’s a good chance I committed this murder, Celine.”
“What?!” It was the first time she’d lost control of her driving and nearly got them both killed. It took her a succession of quick reactions to keep all the dominoes from falling. But finally she got them back to a place of relative safety, even if she hadn’t slowed the car any. “You want to run that by me again?”
“I was bored out of my mind when…”
“Bored out of your mind? You have the most interesting job in the world, Adrian: securing the future for the rest of us. Remember the days when it was just the jihadists? You’d hear about one every once in a while blowing up a bus in Israel. Then all of a sudden they were everywhere, blowing up every public place, all over the world. That was what, 2016, 2017?
“Flash forward a few years and it’s like you say, everyone’s had enough of the one percent vacuuming up the wealth and squeezing the life out of the ninety-nine percent. Who doesn’t want some vigilante justice? Who doesn’t have a hit list with some multi-billionaire’s name on it and an action plan? If they can’t think that far, to the actual culprits, they just lash out mindlessly at the rest of us.”
“Yeah, but who do you know more qualified to get past all the souped-up countermeasures? Hell, I’m the most souped up countermeasure of all.”
He sighed before staring numbly out the windshield at proof his life was flashing before his eyes. “As to how I could be bored doing what I do? It’s just a game of Whack-A-Mole after a while. As soon as you thwart one world-ending scenario, another two pop up. It’s exhausting work more than it is creative.”
“You don’t fit the profile, Adrian.”
“Sure I do. I’m a big fan of vigilante justice. I think we should do what the Jews did after the Nuremburg trials. They never stopped hunting the Nazis. Every rich bastard who has been behind every earth-raping measure from facilitating toxic oil spills to denuding old-growth forests so they can plant palm oil plantations to make ice cream… I don’t care if they were the financiers and shot callers or the ones in middle management saying, ‘hey, I was just following orders,’ they all need to spend the rest of their lives in jail. But it’s more than a righteous thirst for vengeance. You know what my number one fear is?”
“I can guess.”
“That’s right. That one of these guys’ll get past me, whose rage isn’t directed at the one percent but at the ninety-nine percent, because he doesn’t know how to focus his righteous anger where it counts. That some end-of-world scenario I should have seen coming and should have stopped, but failed to, will take us all out.”
“You can’t stop them all, Adrian. That’s why futurists are the new X-Men. Every agency has them, every country. You may be the best of the best, the one they call when the others can’t get the genie back in the bottle, but the idea that you’re meant to stop every one of these bozos is patently absurd.”
“Of course it is. But you’re dealing with a fragile psyche driven nearly mad with worry. What’s reason got to do with it?”
She smiled patronizingly. “So you think your guilt is so extreme over the thought of letting the rest of us down that you’ve… you’ve what?”
“I think I might have split off another personality, a killer alter ego, made him the one person who gets past me time and time again because…”
“At least that gives you some sense of control. It’s sick, but it’s brilliant. Wish I’d thought of it. A Jekyll and Hyde futurist. Sounds like a great book. Hell, it sounds like a great series of books. You should write them someday.”
“You shouldn’t kid when I’m baring my dark twisted soul.”
“Who’s kidding? The best serial killers in the world would be writers, if they didn’t have their writing to keep their noses clean. It helps them channel all those proclivities in a more socially redeeming fashion.”
“I’ll take it under advisement but somehow I don’t think healthy channeling of unseemly urges fits my profile.”
“Why?” She glanced back at the road at the last second to forestall impending doom off the back of some guy’s fender, swerved. Problem averted, she nailed her eyes to his.
“Because, you see, my mother was a split personality.”
Celine did a double-take and once again nearly drove them off the road. She struggled to regain control of the car, which mercifully came quicker this time. “You’re reaching, Adrian.”
“Really? Did you know my father bred birds? Carrier pigeons, to be precise. His time on the roof of our tenement was his quiet time away from mom and her madness. He was quite the expert at improving their germlines, making them better carrier pigeons with each generation.”
“So you think you might be behind the altered ravens?” She was panning her had away from the road now to check his reaction to her putting two plus two together. “Man, this guy really is inside your head. He’s doing one hell of a number on you.”
“Or so you’d like to believe. So we’d both like to believe.”
“As much as I hate to say it, it’s Dion you need to fuck. She’s the shrink. She’s the one who can tell you if you’re full of it or if you’re on to something. Celine Dion? Why didn’t I make that connection before? You’re dating girls whose names spell out your favorite singers?”
“It’s sick, I know. But everyone needs some kind of compass to guide them home.”
She laughed past all the shackles she put on the reflex. So did he. “See, proof you’re not crazy. You can still laugh about yourself. I have it on good authority that crazy people have no sense of humor at all.”
He snorted. She took a sharp right at the next cross street. “Where are you going?”
“I’m driving you to Dion’s.”
“You know where Dion lives?”
“I know where all your girlfriends live. You think we don’t check up on one another, compare notes?”
“You’re bluffing.”
“I guess we’ll know soon enough.”
“Alright, stop. This is creeping me out. Just keep going to your place. I can fuck Dion tomorrow if I’m still feeling attached to the idea that I might be the actual killer this time.”
She gave herself a couple seconds to process the idea. “Yeah, okay.” Then she did a full U-turn with the car, tires screeching, and headed them back in the direction of her place. “Seriously, though, Adrian, I can already tell you what she’s going to say. If you have groupies by the score, they know they have to find a way to rise above the noise. That means, sure, one very choice piece of end-the-world-as-we-know-it-forever tech, but it also means knowing your weak points, how to fuck with you, how to get inside your head. Without that, they risk not having the necessary magnetism. Hell, don’t you pawn most of your work off these days on a coterie of protégés, the junior futurists, the dozens or so it will take to do your job when you step down? Your increasing workload alone necessitates these creeps find some way to stand out beyond simply being taken seriously as a world-ender.”
He missed the beat, mulling over the notion. “I guess.”
“You guess, I know. Trust me on this.”
“Do
n’t think I don’t know what you’re doing. You’re hoping if you can play Dion’s role well enough I can get rid of her and consolidate girlfriends, so you can get an extra night with me a week.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. All my other boyfriends have bigger dicks, nicer bodies and can fuck for way longer.”
“Why you keeping me around for then?”
“A pity fuck.”
It was a delayed reaction, but it was inevitable. He laughed. The kind of laugh that brought tears. “Well, for what it’s worth, you’re the first woman who ever made me want to aspire to be a pity fuck.”
FIVE
Celine was in the bathroom brushing her teeth in her panties. And nothing else. She took the brush out of her mouth to make it easier to chastise herself. “When brushing your teeth this vigorously, keep the bra on. You look like Carman Maranda dancing with a pair of cucarachas.” She returned to her brushing. That’s when she heard it.
The moaning.
The carrying on.
Did Adrian mistake room service for her? The poor woman didn’t speak a word of English. Considering Celine and Adrian’s shared love of opera, he probably just thought he’d provoked her to break out in a few Spanish arias. Come to think of it, there had been that time… No, this was something else. The voice was too deep, even for Esmerelda, the maid.
Celine sped up the final act of her tooth brushing, did a couple rinses, wiped her mouth and inched towards the bathroom door.
Suddenly she was in a horror movie and afraid to look. With each tiny step, the door just got further away. The tenor of the moaning morphed in keeping with her worst fears. That could be Adrian getting knifed in there! Didn’t he tell you to keep a gun in every room? But you couldn’t find a pistol small enough to not crowd out more bottles in the medicine cabinet than you dared. The sacrifice seemed worth it at the time.
Finally she got to the opened door jamb, grabbed both sides and crouched down, ready to spring, like an Olympic platform diver preparing for that first somersault into a double pique.
Her eyes began to adjust to the darkness.
She stood up and folded her arms, a sour look bursting over the horizon of her downturned lips. She flicked the lamp light on by the bed.
Adrian was making out passionately with Jane Doe, her sex doll.
“Oh, my God, Celine! This is the fuck of my life! You’re too good to me. I’ll never ever leave you. More, Celine, more. Harder, Celine, harder.”
Her mouth started to twist up into a wicked smile despite her every effort to subdue the rebellion of her facial muscles.
Sensing her looming presence, he looked up at her, perplexed. “Celine? But I thought…”
“Very funny. Keep that up and that’ll be your treat for the night.”
He smiled and rolled over on his back. Sighed. “I’m ready for an after sex cigarette. How about you?” He held the pack towards her.
This guy could riff on his own jokes until hell was on its third refreeze.
She grabbed the doll off the bed, the sour look returning to her face.
“Hey, I’m actually glad you took my advice. In case you hear someone fiddling with the lock on your door, slip Jane under the covers and go crouch in a corner in the shadows with both hands on your pistol. Let the guy get well past the door so…”
“I remember the lecture just fine. I’ll have you know Jane is a gift for a mentally retarded teen I’m big sistering, though I’m not sure it’s the best idea I’ve ever had on that score.” She stuffed the doll back in the closet.
She crawled into bed and slithered on top of him. They embraced and kissed. “For the record,” he said, “I wouldn’t trade your satiny smoothness and warmth for her cold plastic any day. Why don’t you let me get one of my serial killers to upgrade the kid’s plastic doll for him with a real skin suit?”
“And they say charity is born of a generous heart.”
She silenced him with more kisses.
The traffic was picking up outside the window. It sound like swooshing waves at the beach. It wasn’t long before they were fucking to the rhythm of the “waves.”
Later that night, Celine stood in the corner, shivering, presiding over a feverish, sweating, tossing and turning Adrian making a mess of her sheets on the bed. She was shaking so badly that reaching for one of his cigarettes to light to calm her nerves got her so mad fighting with her own body that she was starting to pull muscles. She forced herself to calm down.
Adrian was giving her one of his all-too familiar lectures. Only…
“The Internet of Things is looming. Everything connected to everything else, digitally, wirelessly, instantly. But for the circle to be complete, the person must have a chip in their heads, or in their forearms, somewhere on their body. Giving them a wireless interface with the All. And once that’s true, then they can be hacked, manipulated, force-fed any dribble anyone with the hacking aptitudes cares to feed them. For once the bible thumpers got it right. It really is the mark of the beast.” Adrian was sweating, his head swinging back and forth on the pillow like a searchlight sweeping the ocean for a ship to rescue, only his eyes were closed. He was dreaming, or sleep-talking. Whatever it was you called this.
“Adrian, wake up,” Celine called from the other end of the room, afraid to get any closer. He’d served in Iraq. You never woke a soldier in a state like this, whether or not it was some PTSD flashback. They could kill from their sleep. The instant they misinterpreted the intent of the person behind the hand reaching out for them.
She continued watching him in the pale silvery blue light of the full moon peeking in her window. Glowing LEDs also provided dim illumination for the room. They seemed to wrap around the two humans in a protective circle, as if drawn in homage to Techa, goddess of emergent technologies that were coming for all of them.
“Wake up?” Adrian scoffed, as if hearing her. “That’s the thing, can’t wake up. Can’t ever wake up when you’re chipped.
“Don’t even need to be chipped to become enslaved. Just need to keep your mind busy, creating, inventing, tweaking last year’s tech with this year’s upgrades. That’s the beauty of this age… only way to make money is by being brighter than everyone else, thinking harder, faster, longer, never giving the competition an edge. Smart drugs, they call them nootropics, don’t you know, of course you take them… whatever it takes to stay one step ahead. And now comes the mind chip. How can you say no? How can you give up your competitive edge?”
Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. She outed the cigarette, padded over and shook him. “Adrian!” She shook him harder. The most she could get was his skin to shimmy on the surface. The man was a log. No, he was a slab of granite. How could anyone be that dense? If she could pardon herself the joke at his expense. The man lay there with the gravity of a thousand suns, falling through her bed, through the core of the planet, through the solar system. He’d take them all down into the drainage hole of his being, that black hole of self-persecution.
Celine ripped the covers off him, pranced into the bathroom, using its nightlight to guide her. She picked up the glass at the edge of the sink with ice and booze still in it. Sniffed the glass to be sure; she was certain she’d finished her drink. Smelled the vodka. “I’ll be damned if I waste good booze on one of your nightmares.” She finished the drink, tapped the faucet, and filled the glass with water. When she came back out to the bedroom, she threw the water in his face.
He just swiveled his head back and forth more feverishly than ever on that turret of a neck that looked like it belonged more on a tank, as if he were drowning. “Why won’t anyone pay attention?! Why don’t they see what’s right in front of their faces?!” He was actually shouting. She stared at the walls, afraid he’d wake the neighbors. “God damn news twenty-four seven on CNN, on practically every channel, and you think anyone could be bothered to talk about the most glaring problem with the real world of all?
“That we’re all being replaced by robots, software
powering self-help IVRs, self-driving cars, self-driving trucks. Any human that expects to make a living by way of a paycheck won’t have any choice but to be chipped. And then they’ll have you.”
Fuck it, the vodka wasn’t strong enough for this. She made her way to the tray of liquor on the wall table, poured herself some scotch from the decanter. Downed it in one swallow.
She wanted desperately to turn the light on. Thought at first it might wake him up. But considering what the water did, he might just think he was being given the third degree under a bright light in an interrogation room. Hell, it could send him deeper into this thing. But she had to try something. Screw it. She could always flick it back off again.
Celine turned the switch. It didn’t do what she expected. She’d gone with the soft incandescent lights. Even the reading lamp had been tossed a long time ago. She used her Kindle Paperwhite these days to read by and it was self-illuminating. She loved reading in the dark. What did she need bright lights for? She got enough of that at work.
It seemed to have a paradoxical effect in any case, all the lights, even after she’d flicked on every lamp she could find. Instead of the soothing lights calming him, they just agitated him further. “It’s a conspiracy is what it is. People don’t trust the government. The one uncorrupted bastard in there, Bernie Saunders, they ran out of town. Like he could have made a difference. What’s one good man going to do surrounded by all those puppets on big money strings? Need to go after the oligarchs, the 140 or is it the 160 multi-billionaires with everyone in their pockets. Assassinate them all. Time to purge this ocean of shit they gave us to swim in, this End Times they served up for us with technology, no godlike-intervention needed.”
“God damn it, Adrian!” She hurtled the glass against the fireplace in the room hard enough to shatter it. “Wake the fuck up!” She yelled that part loud enough that you could bet someone was calling 911, if only to shut her up.
She was getting scared. But not for him, not anymore. She was getting scared for her and everyone else. Maybe Adrian wasn’t kidding about his being all for vigilante justice. And if his view was that no one else was minding the store, then someone had to keep the handful of those super-rich bastards from robbing everyone blind. Maybe Adrian had decided that someone was him. And maybe he couldn’t face the truth, just like he said, just didn’t jive quite well enough with his Boy Scout image. Made perfect sense he’d split off a personality to do the dirty work for him. Yeah, the more she thought about it, Jekyll and Hyde was the way to go for Adrian, the only way.
Unkillable (The Futurist Book 1) Page 4
