“Oh, I don’t know, a few come to mind,” Victoria mumbled, “not those per se but…” She had lowered her eyes and tilted her head down but seemed genuinely embarrassed when she raised both and gazed into their faces and realized she had spoken her mind unintentionally. She swallowed hard.
“Been doing a lot of that stuff lately,” Klepsky continued with his confession, “you know, like you see in S&M clubs? In actual alleys, in the office, wherever people can witness the comeuppance I’m giving Ed for themselves but don’t dare say anything, for fear of coming up against me. They just hurry on by.” He cleared his throat again, rolled his hat some more between his hands. “So, all in all, I’d say we have some work to do.”
The shrink—Victoria was her name. She’d introduced herself earlier, shaking their hands, as they walked in the office—nodded, doing good keeping a neutral face, but Klepsky could tell it wasn’t easy for her.
“Ed, how does that make you feel, what your surrogate father just described? Do you really enjoy it, or are you just saying that for his benefit?”
He giggled. Like a kettle letting off steam. He always ran hot that one. “Oh, I love him man-handling me and plowing me every chance he gets. He didn’t tell you the best part. We have a boxing ring on the downstairs floor. He was a prize-boxer once upon a time. We box for a good hour. We take breaks, mostly on account of me being passed out on the mat from one of his blows. Beats the shit out of me. Leaves me hurting all over. Broken some bones, left me bruised in places I didn’t know I had muscles. Honestly, the only testy part of the whole thing is how much I have to provoke him to get him to lose it like that, you know?”
Victoria gave one of her neutral-faced nods that were wearing more and more like a plastic mask.
She sat up straight in her high-backed swivel chair suddenly after leaning over her desk with her head and her chest and just hovering there with no arms beneath her to support her. She combed her hair to either side with her fingers, which really didn’t need combing. Then she took a deep breath as she stared out that window.
Finally, the eyes drifted slowly down to Biyu. “And Biyu, what’s with fucking David? I thought you and Klepsky were a thing.”
A long silence. You’d think the bitch came in here to write a suspense novel.
When Klepsky was certain that time had just stopped altogether because God had to interrupt his favorite soap opera to perform some miracle, Biyu said, “I think long and hard about this. I think it because I was raped when I was thirteen. I had a son come out of that. He was taken away from me as soon as he born. Never met him. But he be David’s age now. And when I think of the horrors he might have lived through…” She sighed. “I do anything to make the pain go away. And David… with what I know about his parents… I guess I just want to make his pain go away too, help him know how good it feel to be alive.”
Biyu wiped her tears to find Klepsky, Ed, and David all staring at her. This was all news to them. “See, we’re making progress already!” Klepsky said slapping Ed’s thigh repeatedly. “This is wonderful, just wonderful, doc. I can’t thank you enough. And we’re barely getting started.”
Victoria cleared her throat. “Yes, just imagine.” She wiped her face with both hands covering her eyes, as if it might just be possible to make this whole scene go away that way. After a quick facial massage she pulled the blinds of her hands as if switching to a peek-a-boo game with them, wearing that fake smile again.
“And David, what’s your take on all this?” Victoria said planting her eyes on him like a bird alighting on a tree branch.
“Oh, I can’t stop fucking her. It’s like Crack Cocaine. The more I hump her, the more I want to hump her.”
Victoria took another deep breath, rubbed the back of her neck. Then she grabbed her chin and the top of her head with opposing arms and gave herself a couple chiropractic neck snaps, one each direction. Finally, she let out the trapped air in her lungs, unwittingly making a tea kettle whistle in the process. Her eyes were staring at the glass of water on her desk, for whatever reason. Maybe her throat had run dry hearing their testimony. Maybe her palms were sweaty. People reacted to shock differently. But the body often went haywire some sort of way. When she pulled out of it, she glanced back at the group, addressing them as a whole.
“Do you have any other notions about how you can make yourselves whole again?” Victoria asked.
“We had the punchbowl idea,” Ed said, barely able to contain his excitement. “We each write our names down on a piece of paper, fold it, and drop it inside. Shuffle the slips about. Then whichever one we pick out, that’s who we sleep with next.” Victoria slipped into a catatonic state, perhaps to think things through better. When she came out of it she was gasping for air. “Dear God.”
Her eyes kept going to the glass of water on the table. What was with the water? Maybe it was gin. Gin, Klepsky could understand her staring at right now.
“That idea’s kind of on hold for now, though,” Ed confessed. “Being as we kind of like things the way they are.”
“Can I ask you,” Victoria said, addressing the group, “have any of you exhibited these behaviors with other partners in your life?”
They all shook their heads no. Their heads swept left then right in perfect sync. They had never been more in sync.
“Has it occurred to you that maybe, besides failing to grasp what family means in any sense of the word, that instead of healing one another, you’re actually opening Pandora’s box?”
“That’s the whole idea, doc!” Klepsky blurted. “We want to let loose the dogs of hell, air all those ghosts, as it were. How else are we ever going to be in touch with all the emotional neediness that will keep attracting us to the same kinds of partners, only to repeat the same mistakes? And what if those other people we attract are worse still? Ed might never make it home alive. Or David. Or Biyu. This way, we can draw a circle of love around one another, keep us safe until we can get to the bottom of all this emotional neediness.”
“Ah-huh.” She was a little late arriving on that “Ah-huh.” She nodded then froze, as if in a picture. Perhaps putting herself into brief catatonic states was helping her to process all of this. When she seemed free from locked-in syndrome once again, she said, “I guess that makes a crazy sort of sense. But that is what you have therapists’ offices for, you know? So you can talk through these things rather than acting them out?”
They all shook their heads “no” at the same time. “We all live with this stuff in our minds for too long already,” Biyu said. “This is easier. I feel freer than I ever feel in my life. Lighter. Better.”
“Ditto,” David said.
“Double ditto,” Ed said.
The doc seemed to succumb to locked-in syndrome again. This time her eyes were wide open and unblinking, perhaps even bugging out. Maybe she just had Graves’ disease. The eyes get pushed forward with Graves’ disease. Then she came out of it again. “I guess what I’m afraid of is that you’ll end up reinforcing the bad behaviors rather than diminishing them. I get the theories behind immersion therapy, I do.” She gestured with her hands repeatedly to emphasize the point. “But that sink or swim stuff is usually reserved for agoraphobics, that kind of thing, phobias, not neuroses. And from what you’ve said, I hate to say it but it just points up my concerns.”
She put her thumb and middle fingers of her right hand at opposite ends of her forehead and brought them together repeatedly, pinching the skin together. Then she slammed both open hands onto the desk. “I’m really afraid at this point that if you continue like this, your bizarre little family dynamic won’t be enough. You’ll continue to escalate like any serial killer who starts poking squirrels in the back yard. You’ll go in search of more challenging game. Guys,” she said, sliding the thin drawer in front of her open, the one where people usually keep their paperclips and staplers, “I wish I could sign off on this, but I just can’t. In fact, I think enough crimes have been committed here already to…” She
was now holding a gun at them, and she was picking up the phone, “call the FBI.”
They each reached slowly towards their pockets—they knew the routine—“just reaching for our IDs” Klepsky said. And they all flipped open the FBI-FD badges at the same time.
Her eyes went wide again and her jaw dropped. She slowly returned the phone to the receiver. Then a beat or two later, with all of them refusing to lower their badges, she stowed the gun. They finally put their badges away too. “So, next week at this time it is, then,” she said, closing the drawer and beaming one of those fake smiles at them.
“Looking forward to it, doc!” Klepsky blurted.
Her four patients rose from the couch together. Klepsky shook her hand on the way out like he was drilling for oil. Ed gave her a thumbs-up. David saluted her. And Biyu bowed respectfully and gave her a big smile.
Victoria waited for the door to catch behind them before sighing relief. “The fucking Adams Family has nothing on these people.”
She picked up her phone to her receptionist. “Jill, get me everything you can on the Charles Manson cult. No, no, I just need to brush up.” She used her fingers to stretch the skin at the base of her neck. “Chalk it up to cultural exchange.” She hung up the receiver.
Then she stood, turned one of the seated winged-Pegasus book ends with the wings spread wide on her desk around. The book case rotated behind her, revealing a medicine cabinet to make a druggist jealous. She reached for a couple Vicodin and popped them with the glass of water she always kept at the ready. Both the glass of water and the glass pitcher holding more water sat on a silver tray on her desk.
She stared vacantly out the window.
***
“I thought that went well,” Klepsky said as the four strolled back toward the car.
“Glad we went to her and not Dion,” Ed said chuckling. He didn’t need to laugh so much as vent the excess energy that always seemed to percolate through his perennially lit personality.
“That woman?” Klepsky harrumphed. “She eats souls for breakfast. I don’t know how Adrian can stand it.”
“He could use a good sin eater after what our cases put us through,” Biyu said, her Mandarin accent showing more than usual.
David grunted. “Touché.”
“Our approach has a decidedly more Rasputin-like flair,” Ed said, sharing a chuckle with David.
“Who’s Rasputin?” Klepsky asked.
“The Russian high priest who believed in sinning Monday through Saturday just so he had something to confess on Sunday,” Ed explained. Chuckling again. Always chuckling.
“Can’t believe you fell for that?” David leaned forward as the four of them were walking side by side the way Klepsky had done earlier on the couch so Ed could appreciate his facial expressions to go with his words. “He’s a history student, you jackass. He’s just baiting you to be all smart and condescending again, setting up your next torture session for after you’ve piled up enough infractions.”
It took a beat, but Ed finally said, “When did you say that next session was?”
“Monday, ten AM,” the other three shouted in unison.
“Sharp. Just like us,” Biyu said.
Ed made a dismissive sound with his lips, like a motorcycle trying to turn over. “With everything else maybe. How is it we just can’t see how we push one another’s buttons like this?”
“I can. Sometimes,” David said.
“Yeah, I guess I can sometimes, too,” Ed confessed. “Just not all the time.”
“That’s why we have family, kids. The program only works if you work it,” Klepsky said with confidence to shore up the waning self-esteem of the group.
“A reference to AA, cute,” David said.
“Though, considering how addicted we are to causing our absolutely perfect lives to implode, I suppose entirely warranted,” Ed said.
They had arrived at the car in the parking lot. They were all reaching for the door when Klepsky caused them to pause by saying, “It’s something to think about, Ed. We spend our entire lives trying to set this world straight. But has it occurred to anyone that our world exposes us all to such systematic abuse in all kinds of ways we’re not even conscious of, that maybe we just don’t know how to live without it anymore? That if we actually got a ticket to a brighter future, five minutes after landing there, we’d turn it into hell? Who needs bad guys when the good guys are happy to do all the work for them?”
He could see by their faces that he’d hit a nerve. They each opened the door slowly at the same time, and quietly. It was food enough for thought for the ride home. Probably explaining why not another word was said.
FORTY-FOUR
Adrian backed away from his front window, ashamed to admit the stimulation provided by the crooked neighbors and their endless nefarious pursuits weren’t going to cut it tonight.
He padded over to his banks and banks of surveillance equipment sucking in every questionable transmission from all over the world that filled the bulk of his home. He was like one of those SETI-project people searching for intelligent alien life among the stars. One of these days he was going to pick up the phone and tell them, don’t bother, the aliens were already here. Just one nanococktail injection, one mindchip, one or another untested human upgrade away. And more would be on the way, as soon as their CRISPR units arrived at their doors via UPS to outfit their garage and attic labs with, to help them pull off their gene alternations into God knows what. For now, he just had the AI, written by Ed, to filter the noise for him. According to Ed, it was better than anything the NSA had. But it could only go so far. Adrian’s intuition was still needed to pull the needles out of the haystacks that pertained to the FBI-FD.
He was the guy with strange spires and towers and dishes in his yard and on his roof and on his patio. Being as it was nighttime, they were all lit up now like Christmas. That was in fact how he disguised the whole array of searchers and scanners sucking in data from all over the world. Perhaps he deserved the nickname, Mr. Christmas, he’d inherited from the neighbors.
With all the lights off inside the house, besides the glowing LEDs from all the computer banks and monitors, they must have thought he was in addition to being Mr. Christmas a true devotee of rainbow light therapy, as the glowing LEDs spanned the spectrum. When asked, that was always his reply, in any case. Nothing worse than snoopy neighbors. He should know.
After a few hours, he’d fallen asleep in the swivel desk chair on casters, which, he could assure anyone, was built to prevent such things from ever happening. It wasn’t the ache in his lower back that had roused him. It was something someone had said on his in-ear mike, wirelessly connected to what his AI, Gretchen, was feeding him.
It was most surely his first lead on his next case.
That was good.
Because a powerful mind is a terrible thing to waste.
###
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AUTHOR’S NOTES
Some recent triumphs in anti-aging science and synthetic biology pertinent to this story are listed below.
Anti-ageing breakthrough: Reprogramming the body could extend lifespan, say scientists http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/anti-ageing-extend-lifespan-breakthrough-reprogramming-body-cells-a7477561.html
Synthetic biology is turning into industrial design, says Daisy Ginsberg https://www.dezeen.com/2015/12/10/synthetic-biology-closer-to-industrial-design-genetic-engineering-crispr-daisy-ginsberg/
ANTI-AGEING PILL? Breakthrough as scientists discover how to slow down the ageing process – raising hopes of drug treatments https://www.thesun.co.uk/living/1944409/breakthrough-as-scientists-discover-how-to-slow-down-the-ageing-process-raising-hopes-of-drug-treatments/ Boffins at Nottingham University have found a specific protein inside a certain part of cells which seems to be the cause of ageing…
Humans Genetically Engineered To Be Super Intelligent Could Have An IQ Of 1000
http://www.businessinsider.com/superintelligent-humans-with-iq-of-1000-2014-10
CRISPR: What Does Gene Editing Mean for the Future of Primal Living? http://www.marksdailyapple.com/crispr-what-does-gene-editing-mean-for-the-future-of-primal-living/
CRISPR Gene Editing: The Future & Ethics of Engineering Our World http://www.jove.com/blog/2016/08/31/crispr-gene-editing-the-future-ethics-of-engineering-our-world
Augmented-reality contact lenses to be human-ready at CES https://www.cnet.com/news/augmented-reality-contact-lenses-to-be-human-ready-at-ces/
Samsung Patent Unveils Idea For Smart Contact Lenses With A Camera And Display http://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2016/04/11/samsung-patent-unveils-smart-contact-lenses-with-a-camera-and-display
Benefits of DNA computing https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/2003-04/dna-computing/evaluation.htm
Mind Uploading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
So much research goes into even a highly speculative book of this kind. As much as you’d be tempted to believe it’s all imagination, it’s not. To this end I’m indebted to far too many souls to name. But the short list would have to include:
Those witting and unwitting souls who share their work so freely on the internet. In particular, those folks whose discoveries or reportage thereof weighed heavily in granting my prose that extra realism factor.
My primary Facebook newsfeed folks who keep their nose to the ground for all breaking technology news, especially those pertaining to the transhuman era. Gareth John, Marco Santini, Sergio Tarrero, René Milan, Louisa Baqués, chief among them, but there are literally hundreds of others.
Unkillable (The Futurist Book 1) Page 38
