“We have the woman who made him in our custody. I would think that would earn us some respect.” Sinking into six inches of icy-snow as they trudged slowly forward produced a crunching sound, punctuating each line of dialogue.
“I admit all we have to go on is a hope and a prayer,” Veronica said. “One of those hopes and prayers is hubris is as popular as ever with the male ego, for however synthetic and souped up Tum is.”
“When you put it that way, I feel real hope returning.” He gasped from the biting cold, coughing out clouds of frozen, moist air, ripped right from his lungs. “What now?”
“Now we watch and wait.” She collapsed where she stood, folded her legs. It occurred to him that some attempt at camouflage would be nice. But then he realized she’d already seen to it that their coveralls were white as Iceland snow. Only their face visors were an ominous oil-slick-sheened black. They looked less like soldiers for all that, and more like the people who worked clean rooms in chip manufacturing plants.
She was looking to the sky, which he found curious as she was not of a religious bent, so she couldn’t be praying, and there were no stars out this early in the day, if she were of more of an astrological, star-chart reading and interpreting bent. “What are you looking to the sky for, or are you just trying to work out a kink in your neck?”
She pointed skyward.
He looked up and ducked reflexively as the space cruiser zoomed overhead to a landing not too far from them. Prior to seeing it, he was thinking the hypersonic jet they’d flown in on was pretty cutting-edge. This craft made their ride look like it needed dusting off prior to deciding if it was an antique worth sticking in a museum somewhere or just space junk to be cast off.
The ship that landed was something which plainly shouldn’t exist.
Then again, Tum shouldn’t exist.
He collapsed right alongside her. “One of these days we’re going to have to discuss this penchant you have for precision. Me, I wouldn’t have minded you missing the mark by a little wider of a margin.”
Her lack of response, curiously, just provoked his next question. “How did you know there was something landing here?”
“Iceland doesn’t have a lot of strategic value to someone with an agenda, unless you just need some place very private for a meetup. That in turn begs the question of how the respective parties are planning on getting here. We know how Tum got here. What about the others? I had Ed whip up something that penetrated all next-gen cloaking technologies, after briefing him on all the off-book cloaking options already available, so he could speculate about options we hadn’t considered that other parties might be using. I told him to outfit The Waverider with the new tech. Since it boiled down to software tweaks he had to make, it didn’t slow down our departure by much. His mind can’t compress time like Tum’s, but it comes damn close.”
“Finally a conspiracy going on behind my back that I don’t mind.”
“Good thing I acted when I did. A nanosecond later Ed cut all COMMS to us, and stripped the entire FBI-FD of any electronic device to prevent Tum from stealing any more of our bright ideas to use against us. Like hopping a nuclear sub to get here and…”
“We’re lucky he chose to ignore the one about defecting to Russia and sending an army of unkillable soldiers after us. Though, only because he latched on to an even better idea of getting into bed with these guys. Wonder whose brain he plucked this notion out of? Perhaps one of my worst paranoid nightmares. The kind that attack me in my sleep. Yeah, had to be.”
His comment garnered him no response, far less any praise for his latest insight. She kept a vigil on the ship in the distance making settling in noises. One of which sounded suspiciously like a disembarking gate opening up.
Adrian was still rifling through sci-fi novel covers in his head to see which one this craft belonged on. Flying overhead, from a distance, it might well pass for a dragon. Up close, it was more like the abstraction of one. The head was big and long, and it was attached to a neck nearly as thick. Both were attached to a much bulkier and elongated torso, whose ass end was a very impressive rocket engine. There were two additional engines about half the size at the end of its wings, spreading out from the mid torso region. These smaller engines rotated, much as with a harrier jet.
The ones to walk out of the vessel—that couldn’t possibly exist! Get a grip, Adrian!—were suited in a fashion that might well be appropriate for outer space, providing outer space fashions were that advanced. Adrian had seen prototypes for these more form-fitting, easier-to-navigate suits being designed for the future of space travel. They weren’t supposed to exist for another ten years or so. The fact that he’d never come across any plans for a spaceship of this kind troubled him. He liked to think his people could hack their way in and out of every repository of classified information on the globe, wherever it was. His self-confidence was taking a beating right now about just how on top of things they actually were. He suspected everyone else in the FBI-FD agency was feeling more or less the same way right now. But those shocked feelings of being so out of touch with reality usually stopped several ranks down from Adrian. They weren’t meant to rise up this high in the pecking order.
“What am I looking at?” Adrian said.
“Hard to say. You’re the one that connects dots no one else can connect, Adrian. So start connecting.”
Adrian watched and let the unfolding drama work its magic on him. If his mind was blown, he couldn’t think straight. If he couldn’t think by his customary patterns in the shadow of his customary prejudices, that freed up a lot of space for novel ideas to penetrate his otherwise thick skull.
He took a deep breath and felt the cold flash-freeze his lungs. He was certain exhaling would cause them to crack. How the hell did people live out here? Yes, there were volcanoes to warm things. Yes, the populace stayed away from the more unlivable places like this. But shit, how much accommodation to living on an ice world could you do, really? Even in the presence of Universal Basic Income and a fairer distribution of wealth than was known anywhere else in the world, making this the one country that had the right to proclaim itself “of the free world” any longer, one had to question the true cost of freedom.
He shook off the cold, as responding to it this fiercely was just cluttering his mind again with reactive thought. If the Buddhist monks could melt snow, he could damn well run his chi energy through him at a greater velocity to warm himself up as well.
His mind truly had remained vacant for some time, as in not an idea in the world occurring to him of any use. It was observing a rough-hewn column of opaque ice come to life as Tum melted his way out of it that got Adrian’s mind working again. After exchanging some words with the people standing at the foot of the landing bay that had dropped down from the craft, Tum, stark-naked, stepped aboard.
“Okay, let’s run through the possibilities, shall we?” Adrian said. “Tum is aware of some off-book space program being run here by God knows who, since the Icelanders sure as hell couldn’t mount an enterprise like this. It’s possible they don’t even know about it.”
“It’s my bet it’s a joint effort,” Veronica said. “That or whoever is behind this can keep these vessels cloaked to stay off the radar of anyone that matters.”
“Getting himself into space makes sense if only to reduce the number of attacks that can be mounted against him at once.”
“Check,” Veronica said.
“If his sense of self is reliant on his underlying synthetic biology, it might make sense to get access to rare-earth metals and other ingredients only found with difficulty here on Earth, if they can be found at all.”
“You’re really very good at this free-associating stuff. It’s like logic means little in the face of an intuitive mind that powerful.”
He wasn’t sure if her remark was a dig or a compliment.
“And you’re assuming this space program is way more advanced and has been going on for way longer than anything I am prepared
to give credence to,” Veronica said. “Still, looking at that vessel, I’m prepared to concede you might be right.”
“Your suggestion earlier that this could be a consortium of countries working on this project…” Adrian replied. “If you’re right, we might need to consider that the one thing that could get everyone working together was dialoging with an alien civilization a lot more advanced than we are. In which case the enemy of my enemy is now my friend.”
Veronica grunted. “Wasn’t going to say it. Wasn’t even going to allow myself to think it. But check.”
“If those aliens are looking for a way to integrate with our world better without surrendering any of their superior advantage, Tum would hold quite the key.”
“Shiiiiiit!” she said coughing and nearly choking on the words. “Check and double and triple check. I hate how you make the most impossible idea of the bunch sound like the one that I can least ignore.”
They sat in silence, continuing to mull over the possible explanations for what they were seeing, as those on board the craft continued to exchange cargo with those on the ground.
“But why would Tum willingly make himself a guinea pig for the aliens?” Veronica said after the silence consumed the last of their thinking. “He’d have to know he might not survive all the poking and prodding.”
“Poking and prodding was how he came into being. Synthesized and resynthesized rapidly from one relatively inferior incarnation of himself to a relatively superior one, all in record time. Now that he’s at the top of the food chain, the responsibility of evolving himself would now fall on him. And to do it rapidly enough to suit him, to suit what he’s used to, he’d have to turn the entire planet into research and development of the ever-faster-evolving Tum.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Actually, I wrote a paper some time back arguing that the best use to which we can put the global economy is doing just that, investing in self-empowerment technology, but for us regular, unupgraded humans. I suggested it was the only real way to get IA—intelligence augmentation—of us mortals to keep up with AI—and the evolutionary curve of artificial intelligence. I thought the idea was brilliant then and I think it’s brilliant now.”
“And what do we know about Tum but that he loves to steal other people’s ideas,” Veronica said. “He’s used our best thinking against us and to forward his own ends. For such a leap forward in evolution, he’s not the most original thinker.”
“Actually, that’s how imaginations work, taking the brightest ideas put forward by other people, and shuffling up the context a bit, looking for new and better ways to implement them.”
More silence ensued as they lived with these ideas, as one lives with unwanted ghosts, because what choice have you, really?
“With access to the alien tech, he wouldn’t have to mobilize the entire world to continue his pace of evolution. Suddenly I like his odds a lot better for achieving his goals,” Veronica said.
“Both in the short and the long-term. In the short-term he gets to help the aliens invade quietly, under the radar. Once they’ve replaced us all—Invasion of the Body Snatchers style—then they will have no problem getting the entire human race to devote themselves single-mindedly to the accelerated evolution of the entire species. Of course, it’s anybody’s guess whether the term ‘human’ will even apply by that point.”
She grunted. “Adrian, only you could make the ravings of a mad man sound like inescapable logic.”
“The question is, what are you prepared to do about it?”
Veronica sighed, reached into her pockets and started assembling what Adrian thought was a rifle, but turned out to be a shovel. She pulled out her iPhone with a tracking app and set about finding and unearthing her treasure.
He decided he’d follow her for shits and giggles.
He didn’t have too far to travel as it turned out.
“You keep a stash here suitable to any end of the world scenario?” Adrian said, the distinct tone of incredulousness hugging his voice like hypothermic arms in this cold.
“I work for the government, Adrian. Paranoid, end of the world scenarios isn’t something you invented. They did. So, yeah, you’d be surprised what you can find practically in arms reach most anywhere in the world. Usually in the least likely places you’d think to look. This site was chosen because, of the entire coastal region, subs can get in closer to land here than most anywhere else.”
She was shoveling as she was talking, which lent a breathy, labored quality to her words, which in turn sounded quite sexy and was getting his mind to go down a path that wasn’t particularly conducive to anything but riding out the end of the world in style.
“You can help me if you like,” she said. “There’s a shovel built into your suit as well, awaiting assembly.”
“I find that by focusing on your ass and your labored breathing that avenues of thought are opening up that I would never have considered.”
“I bet.”
“I’d hate to interrupt the meditation.”
“That ship isn’t going to wait for your divergent, hyper-text thinking to come to an end before it takes off.”
He let go a sulk of a sigh. “Point taken.” He reached into his cargo pants-style pouches and started assembling the shovel. He was soon carving out the corridor to hell beside her.
It had been his intention all along to have her push his limits. She’d done so magnificently by assassinating a room full of people right in front of him, at least when it came to stretching what he could handle emotionally and mentally. And now this, pushing him past his physical limits in terrain clearly meant only for professionals playing a game of Survival-At-The-Edge-of-the-World. If he had no choice but to molt out of the older, more rigid him and into a newer, more pliable him, the way Tum had to, he’d understand better what it was like to be inside his head. Well, judging by how Adrian felt right now, he could tell you one thing: Tum was feeling very much on edge.
THIRTY-THREE
Klepsky shifted another bead on the abacus he’d been staring at blankly for some time from one side to the other. He wasn’t exactly doing math with it. The beads to the left—which were most of them—represented the dismissal of the last fifteen craptastic ideas to flitter through his brain regarding apprehending Tum.
A glance up from his desk alerted him to the fact that people with encyclopedic memories and microscopes were a lot less put off by the absence of technology than one might expect, especially for those a few generations younger than him. The realization of this fact just made it all the easier to berate himself.
Perhaps it was time to chase down Biyu. If he couldn’t entertain scores of ideas at once like the rest of these multitasking brainiacs, he could at least find one idea to lock on to like a pit bull and chew over. She would have the best chance of providing him with that one idea most likely to lead somewhere among the thousands currently being entertained by the entire department of futurists.
He marched out of his office like a man with a mission, the one he’d lost sight off so many hours ago as the last of his brains melted out his ears.
He really did do a lot better with people than with facts and figures.
Now that there was no one to interview and pry their secrets out of, he might as well turn that gift on his own people. See which one of them might be holding on to something that might actually be of use to him.
He ran into Biyu in her glass-walled office being hammer-fucked by the twenty-one-year-old child prodigy David Clancy as she leaned back on her stainless steel work table. She was moaning loud enough to vibrate the walls.
Ed must have seen him staring through the glass wall hang-jawed. He scurried up to him. “Ah, been meaning to ease into this topic as gently as possible.”
Klepsky gazed about the shared communal work space surrounded by all the glass-room offices at the perimeter of the rectangle reserved for intellectual royalty. He was alarmed to find that no one could be bothered to pay much mind
to the sex-workplace boundary issues of Biyu. Either they had grown so accustomed to the sight it failed to be shocking anymore, or, to their minds, any version of Biyu was better to the former caged-wild-animal one they’d been asked to tolerate just a day before.
“Ed, I feel some members of this ad hoc family we’ve put together fail to grasp the essence of family,” he said, returning his attention to the fornicating duo.
“I’m afraid David is using the same B. F. Skinner routine on Biyu, sir, that you’re using on me, to far more startling effect. Maybe he’s just better at it than you are. Or…”
Klepsky craned his head to glare at him.
“Or…” Ed said, fumbling, “just possibly he was between a rock and a hard place like the rest of us, trying to balance his emotional neediness with needing to over-perform in other areas. Perhaps we should reserve judgement until we find out what he’s managed to pull out of Biyu—besides his dick, I mean.”
“Perhaps we should,” Klepsky gritted out begrudgingly. “Depending on the results we might have to cancel our boxing match for tonight, Ed, and schedule an electrocution session instead. I can introduce you to the kit I keep for interrogations stashed in my apartment.”
“Ooh, sounds fun!”
Klepsky turned to him with a scowl on his face. “Ah, I mean, that would be terrible, sir, simply terrible,” Ed said, shaking his head as if he wanted nothing to do with it. Klepsky honestly couldn’t tell any more if he was getting into character for his sake or if he was stepping out of character for his sake.
Biyu moaned so loud it created cracks in the glass wall of her office that faced the center rectangle. Klepsky suspected that David had miked her to play up the sounds of ecstasy, but however the trick was accomplished, he had a bigger mystery to solve right now.
Her orgasm complete, she returned to her work, David zipped up and stepped out of the room. “Well, what do you think?” David asked Klepsky. “Got her humming like a Swiss watch, huh?”
Unkillable (The Futurist Book 1) Page 29
