Fire. Hm.
Maybe that’s the answer. Maybe I should burn this place down. Slip out with everybody else fleeing onto the street. With my luck (and unskill set), I’d most likely just burn myself right into a corner. Not to mention public endangerment. Fuck, maybe they were thinking of trying the same thing. Smoke me out. Beat the bushes, so to speak. Nah. Might burn up the Reidier Report. It’d be easier just to come in and grab me.
Why haven’t they just come in and grabbed me, then? They can’t be worried that I might be dangerous. Is there some reason they need to keep me alive?
CLICK-CLINK.
And the little crack-powered tap dancer in my chest slammed to a dead stop, collapsing right on stage.
CLICK-CLINK.
Someone was trying the outer door. G-Men? Toby?
My phone kept up its silent treatment. No more texting. I was going to have to check. No broken mirrors in the trash. Nothing reflective. I could crawl back to the carriage house. Turn on the video surveillance. But if it was Toby, that’d cost precious minutes. I was going to have to sneak a peek from underneath the stairs. And, having unscrewed the lights, I had an advantage this time. The alcove fluorescents were still burning bright, trying to pierce my security blanket of darkness, but the unlit hallway just dulled it down to cataract dim. There’d be a reflection in the glass door. Whoever was there wouldn’t be able to see in, but I’d see out clear as day. My, how the carnival shooting range has turned.
A couple quick breaths to help my tap dancer get a beat going again in my veins, and I edged my head just around the stairs.
FUCK! It was him. The Michelin Man tourist. His hand covered his brow, and he was pressed against the glass, peering in.
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.
I had to call off Toby. There’d be no way for me to get past. But how? Clearly they intercepted my last text. Could I yank open the door and barrel past? It could work. Couldn’t it?
THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP.
Christ. Someone was barreling down the stairs. Another resident.
THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP.
They were going to unwittingly run the gauntlet.
CLICK-CLACK. SQUEAK.
“Good timing.” Man’s voice.
“Guess so.” Woman’s voice.
“Bundle up, it’s cold out there.”
“Right? Have a good night.”
“Stay warm.”
The outer door CLICKED shut.
Two FOOTSTEPS.
Stop.
SQUEAK. CLICK.
The inner security door shut.
Now I could hear his breathing. He stood at the foot of the stairs that I was hiding underneath, totally fetal.
CLUMP.
CLUMP.
CLUMP.
It was the sweetest sound I had ever heard.
CLUMP.
He was going up the stairs.
CLUMP.
Then it hit me. The image of him in the security camera from the other day. Dancing from foot to foot out in the cold, staring up at the building. Number five is up. He thought my little hideout was on the top floor.
CLUMP.
I risked a quick glance out from beneath the stairs. I couldn’t take my ears’ word for it. His hand on the railing. Michelin Man sleeve on his arm. And on his wrist, between the two, a flash of light—a shiny reflection off a piece of twisted metal. Then he rounded the stairwell to continue upward.
But the after-image still echoed across my retina. The rods in my eyeballs screaming in remembrance. A flash of white twisted across them like a Möbius strip.
I think.
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
My phone rattled with vibration next to me. A text from Toby:
Nice fucking haiku
One turn deserves another
When poets collide
Relief. I was saved. His coded reply said it all. Wrapped in a cloak of sarcastic grandeur, Toby was turning onto 39th street, so we poets could collide. And if there was any doubt as to when, the first letters of each line were as clear as day. N-O-W.
I grabbed the briefcase, snatched up my phone, and burst from my hiding place toward the door. The Michelin Man was at least two flights up. Whether he heard me or not, I don’t know. I was out the door, through the alcove, onto the sidewalk, and into the backseat of Toby’s cab. The light at Ninth Avenue, by the grace of God, was green, and down Ninth we went, blending into safe ubiquity.
Toby didn’t pressure me to explain. Didn’t question my sanity or diagnose my paranoia. He told me I looked like shit and needed a shower. We discussed where to take me. Obviously, my apartment was out. As was Toby’s. Hotels required credit cards. I could think of only one place.
* * *
Reidier holds Curzwell’s hand for an extra moment. “Interesting bracelet.”
“I’ll have one sent to your home.”
Reidier releases his hand, pauses, then sits back down. “Do you think they have absinthe in a place like this?”
The man’s smile lines fall into place. “I’m sure they’re prepared to cater to any taste.” Curzwell signals a waitress.
“Fifteen minutes. Then I’d be happy to have a ride to 454 Angell.”
Curzwell nods once. “Although it might be tidier to leave you somewhere close to, rather than at, your home?”
“So you know my address then.”
“As I said, I have done due diligence. Not to mention that house has an interesting history of habitants.”
“How does the Whole Foods work for you? Cloak-and-dagger enough or would you prefer the abandoned drawbridge off of Wickenden?”
“The Whole Foods will be fine.”
“Fantastic,” Reidier says without emotion.
The man wrinkles his brow in thought while Reidier orders his drink. Two dancers step up onto a small raised platform in the middle of the back room and start spinning around steel poles.
Curzwell leans in after the waitress has left them alone. “So that you needn’t worry about discretion, state secrets, or what have you, let’s start with what I know.”
“Sounds good. As long as you don’t expect me to confirm or deny anything.”
“There will be no need for that.” The man tosses five or so of his vitamin pills into his mouth, washes them down with a slug of water, and then launches into his recitation. “You’re a pioneer in quantum cryptography. The work you did for CSG was innovative and lucrative. Unfortunately, the management structure there did not adequately understand how to nurture your talents. The University of Chicago gave you a wide berth and encouraged your creativity, but being an academic institution, they would lay claim to any and all of your technological as well as intellectual property. And in spite of their endowment and impressive resources, they would have been unable to provide you with the necessities of your work on a financial, technical, and security level.”
The man pauses for Reidier to take it in.
“I believe most of that is on my Wikipedia page.”
“What is not in the public domain, however, is the breakthrough you’ve made with teleportation.”
Reidier doesn’t move a muscle. He waits for Curzwell to continue.
“Nor that you are now working for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under Donald Pierce. While the Department’s resources are vast enough to accommodate your needs, their agenda and their, for lack of a better term, power make them a potentially stifling partner. And although they might be encouraging and supportive, they will not hesitate to push you to develop a technology better suited to their ends, while ensuring that you mothball any innovation they see as irrelevant, such as quark echoes.”
The man turns his pale-blue gaze on Reidier and searches his face for a reaction to his revelation.
“Interesting update. Tell me, where do you get your information?” Reidier asks.
“The Beimini® Corporation105 is not without resources. While I am unable to illuminate you on our research methods, I do sha
re your concern for how we came to learn so much.”
Reidier presses his palms together and brings them up to his lips. After some time he asks, “Tell me, in your story, do you know the Department’s agenda?”
“I have a guess.”
“Please . . .” Reidier gestures for him to continue.
“While your quark echo method might prove more successful in the transference of consciousness from one pattern container to another, it has the drawback of being a one-to-one transmission.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you destroy the original.”
“Ah.”
“Whereas your current technique, the one in which you’ve had your initial success, allows you to ‘copy’ the subject.”
“Why would the Department prefer this method?” Reidier asks. “Especially if what you’re saying is true that the quark echo approach would yield better results with the transference of consciousness.”
“That’s the multibillion-dollar question, isn’t it? Perhaps they aren’t as interested in consciousness as you are.” Curzwell finishes his bottle of water and proceeds to roll the empty container between his fingertips.
“There are cheaper ways to produce goods,” Reidier says. “The cost of what you’re talking about would far exceed the price of replicating items using conventional techniques.”
“But not necessarily over great distances. Payloads into space can be very expensive, especially when traveling beyond the earth’s orbit.”
“Space colonization?”
“In the future, why not? Surely you must have thought about that. You even mention traveling to Mars in your lectures.”
Reidier’s body language reveals his discomfort. While his lectures are on iTunes University for all the world to download, the pervasiveness of his host’s knowledge of him must be unnerving the physicist.
“There are also more global applications, assuming you eventually perfect the consciousness transference to the point of at least replicating habitual training,” Curzwell says. “For example, there are certain advantages to replicating an individual who knows his way around a Barrett M107 sniper rifle even if they don’t know what killing is. Or especially if they don’t.”
Reidier sits in silence, contemplating Curzwell’s insinuation. He shifts in his seat, squeaking against the leather. Finally, he utters, “Soldiers.”
“They are very expensive to train and often sent into harm’s way. Each casualty incurs a significant financial, human, and political cost. Imagine the possibilities of being able to send platoons of soldiers on numerous suicide missions anywhere in the universe and not have to report a single death. Every ‘individual’ original accounted for and safe. Casualty-free war fought by expendable clones. Very science-fiction/Star Wars, I admit, but then again, so is teleportation itself.”
The man’s eyes flit from Reidier’s face to his hands and back. Reidier’s fingers are intertwined. The knuckles turn white with pressure.
Up on the stage, the dancers have removed their tops and are using their breasts to collect dollars from various patrons.
“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,”106 Reidier says, stricken.
The man flashes an avuncular smile. “Not at all. Quite the opposite. You are the Destroyer of Death. At least that’s what we’re hoping over at Beimini.®”107
The waitress sets down Reidier’s drink. He doesn’t reach for it.
“I’m sorry, what is it that you all would want from me?” Reidier’s voice seems to have lost direction.
Clearly Curzwell, a practiced negotiator, has been waiting for this. He has Reidier off balance and knows it. Now he needs to gently bring him back to equilibrium, supported and steadied by Beimini. “War is too important to leave to the generals, don’t you think?”
“And technology is too important to leave to the scientists.”
“But you are not just a scientist. You’re a critical thinker. And that’s what’s important.” Curzwell lets this sink in a moment and then continues. “What we want is for you to continue your work, any way you see fit. We’d provide all of your technological necessities, relocate you and your family wherever you desire, and guarantee your security.”
Reidier doesn’t respond. One of the dancers, in a green G-string, hangs upside down from a pole, and spins slowly to the floor.
“Furthermore, we’d start you off with a twenty million dollar signing bonus that would be yours outright, and also offer you forty-five percent ownership in any and all of our mutual endeavors. Whatever other wonders you invent or develop outside of the purview of our partnership would be solely yours.”
With the offer of serious money, Curzwell relaxes his posture. He’s confident in the intoxicating draw of wealth, certain that his deal far exceeds the government’s. The pull of the private sector on the institutional man is as unrelenting as gravity.
“That’s a generous offer,” Reidier says.
“It’s what you’re worth.”
“But I still have no idea what it is you want in return.”
Curzwell nods toward the stage, where the two strippers tease their thongs up and down their hips. “What do you see there?”
The blonde stretches the thin material away from her flesh so a calloused hand with dirty fingernails can slip a dollar bill between the elastic and her skin. On the other side, the redhead, the one dressed in green, stands with her back to a patron, bends over, traces her index fingers along the curves of her hips swooping toward her groin, hooks her finger underneath, and draws the thong out from between her buttocks so that a wrinkled hand might slide a five underneath.
“Ritual,” Reidier says.
“An age-old one.”
Reidier wraps his hand around his juice drink but doesn’t lift it.
“What would you say is the source of this ritual?” Curzwell asks.
“Biology. A lack of options.”
“I’d agree on both counts. But why do these customers come here?”
Reidier continues to clasp his glass.
Curzwell lets out a laugh. “Yes, the scantily clad women, of course. Sexual urges, et cetera, et cetera. But on a psychological level what are they really getting? I’ll tell you. They’re becoming invigorated. Alive. In a word, youthful.”
An inebriated man leans across the stage to slide a bill up the redhead’s leg, but she moves out of reach and wags her finger at him.
“They come to feel young,” Curzwell says. “These men come to be close to young women. Why young women? Because they’re fertile. The act of sex at its most basic level is the urge to continue the line, to cheat death. It’s a pervasive, universal urge.”
Reidier finally lifts his glass and sips.
“And with your help, we think Beimini® Corp can cater to that need.”
“I’m sorry?”
“We would support development of any and all technological innovations you might have, and apply no constraints about how to proceed, whether it be with quark echoes, nanofabrication, or something else entirely. We would just want you to figure out how to adapt your progress to our needs.”
“Your agenda.”
“Our agenda, yes, but with complete respect for your autonomy. And full disclosure of our goals and targets. You will never wonder about our motivations or what we’re planning to do with your work. Transparency precludes the need for trust. You’d be our partner, not our project.”
“How does this tie in to cheating death?”
“Your fourth step.”
“What step?”
“In teleportation. What you call the animation step.”108
“Transference and animation,” Reidier recalls.
“Yes. We want to be able to transfer a mind from one vessel to another.”
“That’s the key to all teleportation, isn’t it?”
“Only we’re unconcerned with traveling any distance.”
“Then what would be the point of moving a consciousness from one v
essel to an exact copy?”
“There wouldn’t be. Unless.” Curzwell lets the insinuation hang in the air between them.
“Unless it wasn’t an exact copy,” Reidier says, unable to conceal the astonishment in his tone.
“We call it Restoration. The basic methodology would require scanning a client now, today, storing that data, and then at some later point, using it to reconstruct that same body and then transferring the client’s consciousness from his older self into his younger self.”
“So I would scan you now, then in twenty years or thirty years, I’d teleport you from your older self to your younger self.”
“That’s the basic gist, yes.”
“And that process could be repeated ad infinitum.”
“Restored to your youthful vigor.”
“The Destroyer of Death.”
Curzwell swallows the last of his vitamins. “What is death? I’ll tell you. He’s the world’s most successful thief who has stolen our loved ones and our time for as long as we’ve been around.”
“Death gives life meaning.”
“Nonsense,” Curzwell scoffs. “That’s useless orthodoxy based on a lack of options and perspective. It’s what we do with life that gives it meaning. Art, music, relationships. What we create.”
“You want to bring immortality to market.”
Curzwell winks at Reidier. “The thing about immortality is that you can never affirm you’ve achieved it.”
“It’s inhuman.”
“Science is inhuman. Science is incompatible with humanism. The whole point of it is to escape from humanity. Why do you think we went to space? Science is at war with humanity.”
Reidier doesn’t respond.
Curzwell takes a different tack. “At the same time, science is the ultimate expression of our humanity. You know what separates us from the beasts. This,” he taps the side of his head, “which holds a neocortex the size of a napkin and allows for critical thinking. That and this,” he touches his thumb to his forefinger, “our nimble opposable thumb, which enables us to take our advanced thoughts and fashion them out of the world at hand. Humanity is defined by our ability to manipulate our surroundings, to cross our thresholds and transcend limitations. That’s what being human is.”
Reidier holds his drink and leans back in his chair, facing the dancers. The redhead is on her knees, legs splayed, leaning back. She tugs at her G-string with the beat. In doing so, she reveals a tattoo just above her pubic area. It’s a single word written in a curved path, forming an arc. The footage is blurry, but it looks as if it spells “Panoramas.”
Here & There Page 29
